Evernorth Debuts on Nasdaq With XRP Stash Worth Far Less Than Its Cost

Evernorth, a Ripple-backed treasury company built to hold XRP, began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker XRPN on Monday after completing a merger with the special-purpose acquisition company Armada Acquisition Corp. II. The listing marks a milestone for XRP as an institutional asset, but it also lays bare how much value evaporated between the deal’s announcement and its close — a gap that should give pause to anyone studying the fast-growing corporate crypto-treasury trend.

Evernorth now holds roughly 473 million XRP alongside about $300 million in gross cash. At the reference price used when the merger closed on Friday, October 9, that XRP stash was worth approximately $677 million. When the deal was first announced in October 2025, XRP traded at $2.37 and the companies touted more than $1 billion in combined funding. By closing, XRP had fallen to $1.43 — a decline of roughly 40% in the ten months between signing and completion, and about 61% below the token’s all-time high of $3.65 set in July 2025.

The arithmetic is stark. Evernorth spent close to $947 million accumulating XRP in October 2025. By February, the position was already sitting roughly $446 million below its cost basis. That shortfall has only grown more consequential as the asset finally reached the public market.

A Shrinking Float, a Volatile Debut

SPAC mechanics compounded the problem. Of Armada’s shareholders, 80.3% — about 18.5 million shares — chose to redeem their stock for roughly $10.58 per share rather than ride into the merged company, pulling around $195 million in cash out of the deal before it closed. That left only about 4.5 million shares of the original public float actually trading once Evernorth went live.

A thin float tends to produce outsized price swings, and XRPN delivered exactly that. Shares touched an intraday high of $53 on October 2, then closed that Friday at $39.42. By the time the merger closed on October 9, the stock had fallen to $17.09. Monday’s trading debut briefly pushed shares near $19 before they faded to $16.64 by midday — a pattern more typical of a thinly traded speculative instrument than a company whose core asset is supposed to represent a long-term institutional bet on the XRP Ledger.

Warrants trading under the ticker XRPNW carry an $11.50 exercise price, adding another layer of conditional upside — or dilution — depending on how the stock performs relative to that strike over time.

Who Controls Evernorth

Ownership and governance are concentrated among a small group of backers. SBI Holdings holds a 39.9% voting stake, Arrington Capital’s fund holds 19.9%, and a stake tied to Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen accounts for 9.9%. Ripple itself and its affiliates are capped at 9.9% voting power — a structural choice that appears designed to avoid the appearance of direct Ripple control over a company holding one of the largest XRP treasuries in existence.

The XRP itself came from multiple sources: Arrington’s fund contributed about 211 million tokens, Ripple contributed approximately 127 million, and a trust linked to Larsen added 50 million. Separately, Evernorth used early funding of $214 million to buy about 84 million XRP at an average price of $2.53 — a purchase price now well above the token’s level at listing. A six-month lock-up, running until April 2027, restricts insiders from selling shares immediately, which limits further supply pressure in the near term but also means the float will expand once that window closes.

What the Evernorth Case Signals

Evernorth describes itself as the largest publicly traded company focused on XRP, and it plans to generate yield by running validators on the XRP Ledger and deploying assets into DeFi applications, a strategy now led by former Coinbase Asset Management co-CIO Hugo Jeandesboz. A ceremonial Nasdaq closing-bell event is scheduled for October 14.

The broader digital-asset treasury model, pioneered by Strategy with Bitcoin, has drawn a wave of companies seeking to offer public-market investors indirect crypto exposure through equity shares. Evernorth’s rocky debut is a reminder that the model carries real execution risk: token prices can move sharply during the months a SPAC merger takes to close, and heavy shareholder redemptions can leave a company trading with a float far smaller than originally planned. That combination is what produced Monday’s volatile, thinly traded session.

The episode arrives as institutional crypto infrastructure keeps expanding on multiple fronts, from tokenized venture funds like the one ARK Invest recently put on-chain to new custody arrangements such as the one Standard Chartered has built out in Dubai. Evernorth’s experience suggests that as more of these vehicles reach public markets, investors will need to scrutinize not just the underlying asset but the deal structure, redemption dynamics, and float size that determine how a stock actually trades once the bell rings.

What to Watch

• Whether XRPN’s price stabilizes once trading volume normalizes beyond the first week.
• How Evernorth’s validator and DeFi yield strategy under Hugo Jeandesboz develops, and whether it offsets the gap between XRP’s cost basis and its market value.
• What happens to the stock and share count when the six-month lock-up expires in April 2027.
• Whether other digital-asset treasury SPACs adjust deal terms to account for redemption risk and token-price volatility during the merger period.

Source: Decrypt

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