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The Nevada-based firm announced plans Monday (Oct. 20) to go public via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger with Armada Acquisition Corp II, which the company says is expected to generate $1 billion.
“Evernorth is designed to provide investors with simple, liquid and transparent exposure to XRP through a publicly listed vehicle,” the company said in a news release.
“Unlike a passive ETF, Evernorth seeks to grow XRP per share over time by participating in institutional lending, liquidity provisioning, and DeFi [decentralized finance] yield opportunities.”
The release added that Ripple’s XRP — “as one of the few digital assets with a recognized regulatory framework in the U.S. and a track record in powering global payments” — is “uniquely positioned for growth and broader institutional adoption.”
Evernorth says its model is designed to tap into this moment, giving investors exposure to XRP’s price and the “upside of active treasury growth and ecosystem participation.”
The company was founded and is led by former Ripple executive Asheesh Birla, who spoke of capitalizing on existing traditional finance yield generation strategies and deploying DeFi yield opportunities, while also contributing to the ecosystem’s growth and maturity.
“This approach is designed to generate returns for shareholders while supporting XRP’s utility and adoption,” Birla said. “It’s a symbiotic model: Our strategy is designed to align with the growth of the XRP ecosystem.”
In other digital asset news, PYMNTS wrote Monday about a recent speech by Federal Reserve Governor and former Vice Chair of Supervision Michael Barr about the future of the U.S. stablecoin system following this summer’s passage of the GENIUS Act.
“[T]here is a lot of work to do on the part of the government to fill in the specifics during the rule-writing process,” Barr said, adding that digital assets like bitcoin could function as a stablecoin reserve asset under the GENIUS Act as it is currently written.
The act allows repos backed by “any medium of exchange authorized or adopted by a foreign government,” Barr said. That definition, however, could cover volatile assets such as bitcoin, given El Salvador’s ongoing recognition of bitcoin as legal tender. A clever issuer could argue that a bitcoin-backed repo is an eligible reserve asset.
Stablecoin issuers “traditionally retain profits from investing reserve assets and therefore have a high incentive to maximize the return on their reserve assets by extending the risk spectrum as far out as possible,” Barr added in the speech.
