This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).
This Week
XRP ends the week around $1.30, up 2.5%. It traded between $1.40 on Wednesday and $1.25 on Saturday. It also gained 3.3% against bitcoin, in a week bitcoin slipped. Crypto as a whole edged down 0.4% to $2.77 trillion, and bitcoin holds 58.6% of it. The Sensei Fear and Greed reads 42 for crypto. That is still Fear, a little warmer than last week’s 38.
The week’s shape comes from what happens next. Ripple’s Swell opens in New York on Tuesday, its biggest stage of the year. The lead story below walks through what is on it, what XRP has done after past Swells, and why the ledger’s lending feature will not be switched on by the time the speeches start.
Two other moves landed on the ledger and in the filings. Evernorth signed up to sell new shares, and the reason sits in its own paperwork. Franklin Templeton moved a large block of a money market fund onto the XRP Ledger in a single day.
The Consensus
🌊 Ripple’s Swell opens in New York on Tuesday, with the ledger’s lending upgrade still 10 validator votes short.
🏦 Evernorth’s share sale could raise up to $80.7 million, timed for when the stock trades above its XRP.
🏛️ Franklin Templeton issued $150 million of fund shares on the XRP Ledger, all of it in one wallet.
The Numbers
The Chart Watch
The Ripple Effect
🌊 Swell Comes Home to New York, With Lending Still Switched Off
Ripple’s Swell opens on Tuesday 27 October at The Shed in Manhattan. It runs for 3 days across 3 stages. Ripple expects more than 1,500 people and 100 speakers. This is the 10th Swell, and the first to fold in XRPL Apex, Ripple’s conference for developers on the ledger.
Swell is where Ripple puts its biggest news in front of the banks and funds it sells to. Last year’s event was also in New York. Ripple used it to announce a $500 million investment, led by Fortress and Citadel Securities. That deal valued the company at $40 billion (ForkLog). RLUSD was first shown off at the 2024 event in Miami. Hopes run high every year.
Tuesday 27 October. The invite-only summit for institutions runs, with speakers from DBS, Evernorth and RLUSD’s advisory board, which includes Raghuram Rajan, the former head of India’s central bank.
Wednesday 28 October. Brad Garlinghouse opens the main stage, and Monica Long, Ripple’s president, sits down with Robinhood’s Johann Kerbrat. David Schwartz, Ripple’s former chief technology officer, talks about what comes next for the ledger at 4:30pm ET / 8:30pm UK.
Thursday 29 October. Garlinghouse sits down with Tom Farley, who runs the crypto exchange Bullish and used to run the New York Stock Exchange.
Speakers from BNY, ICE and TD Securities are on the bill too (Ripple). RippleX’s Jasmine Cooper is due to set out a roadmap for institutional lending and trading on the ledger.
That roadmap runs into a vote. An upgrade to the XRP Ledger switches on only after a supermajority of validators backs it for 14 days in a row. That means more than 80% of the 35 on the trusted list. One dip below the line restarts the clock. The lending feature has 19 votes. It needs 29. A smaller bug-fix package was due on Friday. On Wednesday 21 October its support fell to 26 votes for about 2 hours. The countdown reset, and the fix is now due on Wednesday 4 November (CryptoTicker).
So anything said about lending at Swell is a plan. Arf, a Swiss payments lender, agreed with Ripple on Thursday to fund payment companies in RLUSD on the ledger. Its move onto native lending waits on that same vote. Evernorth has promised “something special” at Swell, with no details.
The Fed decides on rates the same Wednesday. The decision lands at 2:00pm Eastern. That is 6:00pm UK. Futures put the chance of a hold at about 90%. History is not kind to the event either. 24/7 Wall St. tracked 6 Swells since 2018. XRP closed the event month lower in 5 of them. Last year it fell 14.1% in November (24/7 Wall St.). Ripple has not announced a public livestream. It says most sessions will be recorded and published afterwards.
🏦 Evernorth Wants to Sell Up to $80.7 Million of Shares. Here Is Why
Evernorth can now sell up to 5,218,935 new shares to Cantor Fitzgerald, over the next 14 months. It disclosed the agreement on Friday 23 October. At Thursday’s close of $15.46, those shares are worth about $80.7 million. Cantor pays 97% of the average market price and sells them on. Nothing can be sold until the SEC declares the matching registration effective (SEC).
This kind of deal is called an equity line. Evernorth decides when to sell, and how much, a little at a time. Each sale is capped at 20% of the shares traded over that window. XRPN traded about 330,000 shares a day late in the week. That allows roughly 65,000 shares a day, or about $1 million. It is slow by design. At that pace the full $80.7 million takes months.
So what is the money for? The filing names 3 uses. The first is “general corporate purposes, including the acquisition of XRP”. The other 2 are activity in the XRP ecosystem and working capital. The filing also says the chance to sell will come “if and when our stock price trades at a premium” to the value of its XRP (SEC).
That premium is the whole mechanism. If a share sells for more than the XRP behind it, the cash buys more XRP than that share represented. Every remaining holder ends up with slightly more XRP per share. Strategy built its bitcoin pile the same way.
Right now the premium is there. Evernorth holds 473 million XRP, worth about $615 million at $1.30. Its 57.5 million shares, counting both classes, closed on Friday at $15.06. That values the company at about $866 million, roughly 1.4 times its XRP alone. Each share holds about 8.2 XRP, worth around $10.70.
There is a second source of cash. On Monday 19 October the SEC declared effective a prospectus covering 11,499,992 shares that warrant holders can claim at $11.50 each. If every warrant is exercised for cash, Evernorth receives about $132 million, also for “general corporate purposes”. The shares themselves went nowhere. XRPN closed at $15.23 on Monday and $15.06 on Friday. The filing ties the timing of every sale to that premium.
🏛️ Franklin Templeton Puts $150 Million of a Money Market Fund on the XRP Ledger
Franklin Templeton now holds about 193 million fund shares on the XRP Ledger. On Wednesday it held about 48 million. Its issuing account recorded 2 subscriptions of $75 million each that day. On Thursday it issued 2 batches of just over 72.18 million shares, at about $1.04 each. That is about $150 million of new money, and about $200 million in total (CoinDesk).
Each token is a share of the Franklin OnChain U.S. Dollar Short-Term Money Market Fund, sold in Singapore as sgBENJI. The fund holds short-term dollar debt, government paper and bank deposits. Its return builds up in the share price. Franklin launched it with DBS in November 2025, for wealth and accredited clients, with a $20 minimum. Under a deal with Ripple, DBS clients are meant to be able to switch between sgBENJI and RLUSD.
Every share sits in a single wallet. That wallet is controlled by the same 8 signers as Franklin’s issuing account. Holding sgBENJI on the ledger needs Franklin’s approval, and Franklin can freeze balances. Brokers often hold shares for many clients in one account. Franklin has not said whether this is one investor or many. It had not answered CoinDesk’s questions by Saturday.
RWA.xyz now ranks Franklin as the second-largest real-world asset on the XRP Ledger. RLUSD leads at about $930 million. Ondo sits third at $185 million. The fund runs on other networks too, Stellar among them.
Franklin had a good week on the XRP side as well. Its spot XRP fund, XRPZ, took in $3.55 million on Thursday. That was most of the $4.3 million that came into the US spot XRP funds over the week. The funds were back to inflows, a week after their 13-week streak ended (crypto.news).
The $150 million bought no XRP. The fund holds dollars and dollar debt. XRP’s part is the fee each ledger transaction burns, and the small XRP reserve every ledger account has to keep.
Seen on X
Sensei’s Insight: David Schwartz posted on Friday that a world where the XRP Ledger wins in finance while XRP sees little demand is very unlikely. In a second post he added that XRP is the only asset on the ledger any account can accept without trusting an issuer. It lands in a week Franklin Templeton put a money market fund on the ledger and bought no XRP doing it. Schwartz takes the Swell main stage on Wednesday, with the lending vote still short.
Debunked
On Wednesday 21 October, Whale Insider shared word that Ripple had launched RLUSD-backed loans. U.Today ran it the same day under the headline “RLUSD-Backed Loans Go Live as Ripple Launches 24/7 Stock Trading for Institutions” (U.Today). The trading part is real, and old. On 15 October, Ripple Prime opened round-the-clock swaps on more than 100 markets, from stocks to gold, and it accepts RLUSD as collateral for them. Collateral posted against a trade is margin. No lending product launched, and U.Today’s own article describes none.
There is a grain of truth, and it arrived a day later. On Thursday Arf and Ripple agreed that Arf will fund licensed payment companies in RLUSD on the XRP Ledger, with loans repaid in 1 to 5 days. No amounts were given (Arf). What is confirmed is a partnership and a plan. What is not live is lending on the ledger itself, which still waits on the validator vote laid out in the Swell story above.
The Polls
This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).