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 at $1.42, inside a range of $1.35 to $1.55. It gave back 6.5 percent over 7 days, and it did that while the rest of the market went up. Total crypto market value rose 3.6 percent to $2.71 trillion, Bitcoin dominance sat at 58.0 percent, and the Fear and Greed Index closed at 69, which reads as Greed. It read 66 last Sunday.
The week turned on Friday afternoon in Wyoming. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh called the 2 percent inflation goal a “firm, fixed target” and said that unless inflation moves there “clearly and at sufficient speed”, “we have work to do”. The odds of a September rate rise went from roughly a third to a coin flip inside a few hours, and every risk asset on the board sold off with them.
The bigger news for XRP holders came on Thursday, when a company built to hold XRP cleared its last hurdle at the SEC. A date is now set for the vote that puts it on Nasdaq. Ripple also opened a trading desk for American shares, and the spot funds spent the whole week buying.
The Consensus
🏛️ Evernorth cleared the SEC, leaving one shareholder vote on 30 September before a Nasdaq listing.
🏦 Ripple Prime launched Delta One, an equity swaps desk for institutions that requires nobody to own XRP.
💰 The spot funds took $110.49 million, their biggest week of the year by a wide margin.
🧹 Ripple asked validators to drop XChainBridge, which would remove more than 10,000 lines of ledger code.
The Numbers
The Chart Watch
All live entries are posted in real time for premium Substack members.
The Ripple Effect
🏛️ A Company With 473 Million XRP Is One Vote From Nasdaq
On 30 September, shareholders in a shell company will vote on whether XRP gets a company of its own on Nasdaq. The SEC cleared the paperwork on Thursday 27 August. Waiting on the other side is Evernorth, which expects to launch holding at least 473,276,430 XRP, worth roughly $672 million.
The road so far
Armada Acquisition Corp. II listed on Nasdaq in May 2025 as a shell with no business. It signed the Evernorth deal on 20 October 2025, targeting over $1 billion of gross proceeds, and renamed its ticker XRPN 10 days later. The close was first pencilled in for early 2026 and is now expected late this year (PR Newswire).
How a SPAC works, and why not an IPO
A shell company lists with no business, parks the cash in a trust, then merges with a private company that wants a listing. Why that route? An IPO prices shares by asking investors what they will pay, and Evernorth has no revenue or trading record to price. Its business is owning a token. A merger settles the value privately, with the money already raised, and finishes in months rather than a year. Every Armada share that is not cashed in becomes an Evernorth share one for one.
Who is behind it
Evernorth is run by Asheesh Birla. He joined Ripple in 2013 on the founding team and ran RippleNet as the company grew past 1,000 staff.
Most of what went in was not money. Rippleworks is a charitable foundation. It contributed 211,319,096 XRP through the sponsor, the biggest single contribution. Ripple put in 126,791,458 XRP of its own. A trust belonging to Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen added 50,000,000.
Cash came to $224.5 million. The rest of that billion arrived as tokens. SBI, Ripple’s long-standing Japanese partner, said it was providing $200 million of it. Garlinghouse, Alderoty and Schwartz are expected to advise, and Evernorth says its governance is independent of Ripple.
What it means for the XRP price
Will the vote actually pass
The sponsor is the Arrington XRP Capital Fund, and Michael Arrington sits on the board. It owns 26.2 percent and has agreed to vote in favour. The main proposal needs a simple majority of the votes cast, and the merger step needs two-thirds. Votes cast is what matters. Shares that stay at home do not count against it. Anyone who dislikes the deal takes the cash instead, since redeeming and voting are separate.
That makes redemptions the number to watch. Every share cashed in is money that never reaches the XRP, and no minimum cash condition stops it.
Armada has 18 months from its listing to complete a deal or wind up and hand the trust back. The listing closed on 22 May 2025, so the outside date is 22 November 2026.
What happens to the share price
6 Questions on Evernorth
Can I buy it today?
The shares already trade on Nasdaq as XRPN and closed Friday at $10.55. Until the merger completes they are backed by the cash in the trust rather than by XRP, which is why they have not tracked the token.
Would this be the first way to hold XRP as a share in the UK?
XRPN is an ordinary US share rather than a fund, and US funds are largely closed to UK retail for want of the key information document UK rules require. It is not XRP exposure yet. The share tracks the cash in the trust until the merger closes, and only then does its value start moving with the tokens.
How is it different from an ETF?
An ETF holds XRP and tracks it, so each share is a fixed slice of the pile. Evernorth can issue shares, lend its tokens and chase yield to raise the XRP behind each share, which is also why it can trade above or below what its XRP is worth. It trades above when investors expect those strategies to add XRP per share, and below when they doubt it or fear dilution from new shares.
If I own the shares, do I own any XRP?
No. A shareholder owns part of a company that owns XRP, with no claim on any particular token and no way to swap shares back into coins.
How likely is it to pass, and when does the share start tracking XRP?
Very likely, on the arithmetic. The sponsor holds 26.2 percent and has agreed to vote in favour. The thresholds run on votes cast rather than shares outstanding, and both boards approved unanimously. The vote is 30 September and closing is expected shortly after. That is the point where the share stops tracking trust cash and starts tracking XRP.
What happens if the vote does not pass?
Armada would carry on hunting for a deal until its 18 month deadline, then wind up and return the trust money. Evernorth would keep its XRP and need another route to a listing.
🏦 Ripple Opened a Desk That Trades Apple Shares
Ripple can now put a hedge fund into Apple shares without the fund ever owning one. Ripple Prime launched a Delta One business on Thursday 27 August, live for hedge funds, asset managers and other financial institutions. It trades total return swaps on US listed equities, stock indexes and digital assets (Businesswire).
A total return swap hands a fund the economic performance of something without the ownership. The fund collects the gain if Apple rises and pays the loss if it falls, and Ripple Prime sits on the other side.
Ripple Prime is the old Hidden Road, bought for $1.25 billion in a deal that closed in October 2025. Ripple puts the scale of the business at more than $1 billion in regulatory net capital. It says the brokerage clears more than $3 trillion a year for over 300 institutional clients (crypto.news).
The swaps cover digital assets too, and none of it requires anybody to own XRP. That is the part worth sitting with. Ripple’s fastest growing line of business now earns its fees from derivatives on other people’s assets, and a swap on the S&P 500 has nothing to do with a token. The argument on the other side is that a settlement asset needs exactly this: a balance sheet, a clearing licence and 300 institutional relationships already in place.
Ripple made one more move in the same direction the next day. It hired Joseph Thompson, the London Metal Exchange’s head of treasury, to work on tokenisation (crypto.news). He leaves the exchange on 31 August after nearly 10 years there.