Ripple-Backed Evernorth Hits Nasdaq Holding 473 Million XRP Worth Far Less Than It Paid

Evernorth, the Ripple-backed company built to stockpile XRP, started trading on the Nasdaq on Monday under the ticker XRPN, giving anyone with a regular brokerage account a way to bet on the cryptocurrency without ever opening a crypto wallet.

The listing caps a merger with Armada Acquisition Corp. II that closed on Friday. Armada was a SPAC, short for special purpose acquisition company: a listed shell with no business of its own that raises cash, parks it in a trust, and waits to merge with a private firm that wants to skip a traditional IPO.

Evernorth enters public markets holding roughly 473 million XRP and about $300 million in gross cash. At the $1.43 XRP reference price used in the deal's closing filing, that stash is worth about $677 million.

The $677 million figure falls well short of the pitch Evernorth made when it first announced the deal in October 2025, when it touted more than $1 billion in funding to buy XRP. The merger documents priced the token at $2.37 at signing, so by closing day XRP had lost roughly 40% of its value.

Evernorth spent roughly $947 million buying XRP in late October 2025, and by February that pile was worth about $446 million less than it paid. XRP hit an all-time high of $3.65 in July 2025; the $1.43 closing reference price sits about 61% below that peak.

Evernorth belongs to a crowded category known as digital asset treasuries, or DATs: public companies whose main business is holding a cryptocurrency and raising money to buy more of it. Strategy (formerly Microstrategy) pioneered the playbook with Bitcoin, and Evernorth says it is now the largest publicly traded company devoted to XRP.

The model runs on a ratio called mNAV, or market-to-net-asset value, which divides a company's stock market value by the value of the crypto it holds. Above 1, a DAT can sell new shares at a premium and buy more tokens; below 1, raising money means dilution, where each existing share ends up representing a smaller slice of the company.

About 80.3% of Armada's public shareholders, holding 18.5 million shares, chose redemption, the SPAC investor's right to hand shares back for cash from the trust. They took about $10.58 per share, pulling roughly $195 million out of the deal before it closed.

That exodus left only about 4.5 million original public shares, a tiny float (the pool of shares available for everyday trading) that lets small orders move the price wildly. Days after the redemption window shut, XRPN touched an intraday high of $53 on October 2 and closed that Friday at $39.42, before sliding to $17.09 on October 9, the day the merger closed. On its first day trading as Evernorth, the stock briefly jumped toward $19 before fading to $16.64 by midday Monday, according to Yahoo Finance data.

Tokyo-listed financial group SBI Holdings now controls 39.9% of Evernorth's voting shares, while the fund of Arrington Capital, which sponsored the SPAC, holds 19.9%, and Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen is tied to 9.9%, according to the filing. Ripple and its affiliates are capped at 9.9% of the voting power, and Ripple, a Larsen-linked trust and Arrington's fund signed six-month lock-ups that bar them from selling until April 2027.

Most of the treasury came from existing holders swapping tokens for stock. Arrington's fund contributed about 211 million XRP, Ripple handed over about 127 million, the Larsen-linked trust added 50 million, and roughly 84 million were bought at an average of $2.53 using $214 million in early funding.

Rather than simply sitting on its tokens like a passive fund, Evernorth plans to earn yield through DeFi, or decentralized finance, apps that lend and trade crypto without a bank in the middle, and to run validators, the computers that confirm transactions on the XRP Ledger, all aimed at growing the amount of XRP behind each share.

On Monday, the company named Hugo Jeandesboz, formerly co-chief investment officer at Coinbase Asset Management, to run that strategy. Michael Arrington said in the merger announcement that Evernorth brings “scaled capital, active participation and the standards of a public company” to the institutional build-out of XRP's infrastructure.

Evernorth plans to celebrate the listing by ringing Nasdaq's ceremonial closing bell on Wednesday, October 14, two days after its shares began trading. Alongside the stock, its warrants, which give holders the right to buy shares at $11.50 each, now trade under the separate ticker XRPNW.