XRP treasury firm trend grows as Evernorth, backed by Ripple Labs, enters the arena
The fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, XRP, is getting a new treasury firm: Evernorth.
The firm will list on the Nasdaq and expects to raise over $1 billion in gross proceeds from SBI, Ripple Labs, Pantera Capital, Kraken, and GSR, according to a press release. Chris Larsen, cofounder and executive chairman of Ripple, also announced investing 50 million XRP tokens worth $124.5 million. Net proceeds are dedicated for open-market acquisitions of XRP.
Evernorth joins a number of firms stockpiling XRP, such as VivoPower International, Trident Digital Tech Holdings, and Webus.
The announcement comes during a fragile period for crypto markets, but the latest news has boosted XRP’s price and the asset is back to flat over the last seven days.
Crypto liquidations reached $1.2 billion in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGlass data, as bitcoin continued its downward trajectory. Bitcoin suffered $458.24 million in liquidations, with the bulk of them — over $334 million — in long positions. Meanwhile, the second-biggest crypto, ethereum, saw the second-biggest figure for liquidations yesterday, with $278 million.
Bitcoin slipped as far as $103,856 early Friday morning, its lowest level since July, and is down 13% in the past seven days. The sell-off dragged the total crypto market cap down to $3.67 trillion, down 5.5%. Underscoring the market anxiety, CoinMarketCap’s fear and greed index is now at 28.
Bitcoin ETFs also suffered, registering $536 million in outflows on Thursday. The Ark 21 Shares Bitcoin ETF took the biggest hit, with $275.15 million in outflows. Since Monday, bitcoin ETFs have seen $864.5 million in outflows.
Maja Vujinovic, CEO and cofounder of digital assets at FG Nexus, told Sherwood News that bitcoin’s slump looks like a classic risk-off chain reaction.
“Credit jitters and trade tensions pushed money into gold at record highs while leveraged crypto longs were forced to unwind. Once the liquidations exhaust and policy fog clears, the same macro buyers chasing safety today are likely to hunt value in BTC again,” Vujinovic said.
The US government seized 127,271 bitcoin, worth $15 billion, in what it calls the Department of Justice’s “largest ever forfeiture action.”
The indictment against Chen Zhi, chairman of Cambodian conglomerate Prince Group, alleges that he engaged in wire fraud conspiracy using forced labor in Cambodia.
“Individuals held against their will in the compounds engaged in cryptocurrency investment fraud schemes, known as ‘pig butchering’ scams, that stole billions of dollars from victims in the United States and around the world. The defendant is at large,” according to a DOJ press release.
This is “exactly the kind of outcome the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve was designed to enable,” Zack Shapiro, managing partner at Rains Law and head of policy of the Bitcoin Policy Institute, said on X.
This significantly increases the size of the US’s strategic reserve, which held over 197,000 bitcoin before the seizure. As of today, Arkham Intelligence data shows it’s holding 324,780 bitcoin, worth over $37 billion.
Solana ETFs listings delayed as JPMorgan predicts the funds to net $1.5 billion in first year
JPMorgan analysts noted that “solana is not perceived by investors the same way as ethereum as the main DeFi/smart contract cryptocurrency.”
BlackRock’s bitcoin ETF is on the cusp of $100 billion in assets, a milestone it will have achieved in less than two years
While VOO might be the largest ETF in the world, IBIT — BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF — is the fastest-growing. And the bitcoin-centered product is on the cusp of a major milestone, reporting that it now holds 802,257 BTC, putting it within a whisker of hitting $100 billion in assets (worth roughly $99 billion in good old-fashioned USD at the time of writing).
Considering that BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust launched only 636 days ago, that’s a remarkable speedrun, as individual and institutional investors have embraced cryptocurrency via the exchange-traded fund. For context, VOO took over 2,900 days to hit the same milestone (about eight years).
As noted in a great piece by Robin Wigglesworth in the Financial Times, IBIT is now a major money-spinner for one of the biggest stalwarts of TradFi. As the largest exchange-traded product in the crypto space, and with a not insignificant expense ratio of 0.25%, the ETF is pulling in somewhere in the region of $250 million of revenue for its asset manager parent company. As Wigglesworth puts it:
“Anyway, it’s heartwarming to see that one of the companies profiting the most from an anarchical, decentralised invention supposedly designed to reorder the global financial system is... BlackRock.”
Bitcoin ETFs take in more than $2 billion in two days
Bitcoin is down 2.7% from its recent record which saw it passing $126,000, but bitcoin ETFs are still hot.
The ETFs have already amassed more than $2 billion this week, on track to surpass last week’s $3.2 billion in inflows. In total, bitcoin ETFs have just under $165 billion in assets under management, representing 6.78% of the total market cap, SoSoValue data shows.
BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust by far took the lion’s share, with $1.8 billion of inflows. The fund is also close to $100 billion in assets, despite not even being 2 years old.
Bitwise CEO Matt Hougan said in a note, “The stars are aligned for a very strong Q4 for flows — more than enough to push us to a new record,” in part thanks to the “debasement trade.”
Ethereum treasury companies and ETFs hold more than 10% of the cryptocurrency’s total supply of 120.7 million tokens.
Corporate firms own roughly 5.7 million, while ethereum reserves for ETFs stand at 6.8 million tokens, worth more than $59 billion, per data from analytics platform StrategicETHReserve.xyz.
BitMine Immersion Technologies and SharpLink Gaming have taken the top spots among treasury entities, amassing about 3.7 million ethereum tokens worth roughly $17.4 billion. SharpLink Gaming recently announced that its unrealized profits have reached $900 million since the rollout of its ethereum treasury strategy in June.
Meanwhile, BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust ETF has secured the lead among spot ethereum ETFs with $18.6 billion in net assets. So far in October, $803.1 million of inflows have collectively entered the investment vehicles.