Shareholders of Armada Acquisition Corp. II have approved its merger with Evernorth, clearing the XRP treasury company to start trading on Nasdaq on 8 October under the ticker XRPN.
The deal is due to close a day earlier. Evernorth expects to hold about 473 million XRP at that point, up from roughly 347 million now, which it says will make it the largest publicly traded pure-play XRP treasury.
The headline fundraising figure is more than $1 billion, scaled up from an initial $685 million. The cash is a smaller slice. Gross cash proceeds come to about $300 million, made up of $225 million in private placements, a $30 million convertible note and about $48 million from the blank-cheque company’s trust, Decrypt reported.
Its backers include Ripple, Pantera Capital, Kraken, SBI Group, GSR and Arrington Capital.
Chief executive Asheesh Birla said going public would offer investors a regulated, transparent way to own XRP exposure. The template is the one Strategy built around bitcoin: a listed company whose main asset is a single token.
The timing is kind. XRP rose more than 40 percent in the third quarter and traded around $1.48 this week, The Block reported, which values Evernorth’s current holdings at about $512 million.
The model works best while the shares trade above the value of the tokens behind them, letting the company sell stock to buy more. That premium is what XRPN has to prove from its first day, and nothing in the merger vote says whether investors will pay it. With Ripple among the backers, the company and the token’s biggest promoter are also unusually close.
