XRP Hits Wall Street: Here’s How Evernorth’s XRPN Performed on Debut

Evernorth Holdings began trading publicly on October 12 after merging with Armada Acquisition Corp. II. Its XRPN stock peaked above $19 before settling just under $17 on Nasdaq, giving investors a preview of how the market values a publicly traded company built around XRP as enthusiasm for crypto treasury stock has waned. Data from Yahoo Finance shows XRPN opened at $16.68, then went up to $19.39 before falling to an intraday low of $16.39. It later finished regular trading at $16.91, up 1.38%, with volume reaching approximately 1.29 million shares. After-hours activity then lifted the stock to $17.49. Analyst Scott Melker described the debut as the first major treasury-company test since the sector’s speculative boom faded. “We really haven’t had a major treasury company launch to the public market in quite a long time,” Melker wrote. “We all know that the treasury bubble popped and massively cooled.” The company completed its business combination on October 9, clearing the way for Monday’s Nasdaq debut. As CryptoPotato reported earlier on October 10, Evernorth entered the public market with approximately 473 million XRP and around $300 million in gross cash proceeds. The transaction and associated private placements had raised more than $1 billion, with backing from Ripple, SBI Group, Kraken, Pantera Capital and other investors. The stock’s debut came as its underlying asset remained under pressure. CoinGecko priced XRP around $1.37, down nearly 9% across seven days. The token was also 46% lower than a year earlier and was trading 62% below its $3.65 all-time high. Daily XRP trading volume reached around $2.17 billion, up 107% from the previous day. However, a CryptoQuant analysis found that centralized-exchange spot volume had fallen by $1.94 billion between August 26 and October 11, while futures trading accounted for a growing share of activity. That backdrop complicates the case for XRPN. Investors are buying shares in a company whose assets and planned strategies are tied to an unsettled crypto market, rather than purchasing XRP directly. As Melker put it, the debut may show whether a more cautious second wave of treasury companies can find buyers after the first wave cooled. “So now we’ll get to see how a wrapper of XRP in a specific merged company trading on public markets will perform versus XRP itself,” Melker had posted. And the wrapper won the first session, closing 1.38% higher while XRP lost 3.5% in the same period.