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Prince Abdulaziz bin Turki al Saud, who is spearheading the private offering (Fayez Nureldine/Getty Images)
XRP marks the spot

VivoPower International joins crypto treasury trend, plans to raise $121 million to buy XRP

The US Securities and Exchange Commission also started reviewing a proposed spot XRP exchange-traded fund.

Sage D. Young

Energy firm VivoPower announced a private capital raise of about $121 million to deploy an XRP-focused digital asset treasury strategy, just as the US Securities and Exchange Commission started reviewing a proposed spot XRP ETF. 

Saudi Prince Abdulaziz bin Turki Abdulaziz Al Saud, who is also the chairman of Eleventh Holding Company, led the private offering and said the embrace of a digital asset treasury model was influenced by meeting US President Donald Trump, according to a Wednesday SEC filing

“Having met with President Trump and his leadership group during their recent visit to Saudi Arabia, we believe the timing is appropriate for digital assets and blockchain technology to be rolled out in the Kingdom,” Al Saud said in the SEC filing and press release.

XRP, the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, at $133.8 billion, is largely flat today, while shares of VivoPower have dropped 12% on the news, though the stock was on a run-up in the past week and is still up 22% from seven days ago.

Adam Traidman, former Ripple board member, participated in the investment offering and has also joined VivoPower’s board of advisors as chairman. The investment offering will close if VivoPower’s shareholders approve it at a shareholder meeting, which is expected to occur on June 18. 

“The Company intends to use the majority of the funds raised to accumulate XRP and establish its XRP-focused treasury operations, as well as to contribute and invest in the XRPL DeFi ecosystem,” the SEC filing said.

VivoPower’s move is part of a broader trend of publicly traded companies turning to crypto treasury strategies, championed by Michael Saylor’s Strategy, which has been acquiring bitcoin since 2020. While the “pivot to bitcoin” may be losing its luster, altcoins are now having a moment in the reserve spotlight. SharpLink Gaming revealed plans this week to make ethereum its treasury reserve asset, while other companies like SOL Strategies, Upexi, and DeFi Development Corp have been focusing on scooping up more solana tokens.

VivoPower’s announcement comes after the SEC published its notice that it was reviewing the WisdomTree XRP Fund, a proposed spot XRP ETF that, if approved, would be the first XRP ETF in the US. 

The agency is currently seeking public comments on whether the proposed ETF “is designed to prevent fraudulent and manipulative acts,” according to a Tuesday release. A spot XRP ETF would enable investors to gain exposure to the cryptocurrency through traditional brokerage accounts without directly owning the digital asset. As for which crypto will get the next spot ETF, it looks like it’s down to XRP, which Kaiko Research has picked as the winner, or solana or litecoin, which Bloomberg picked as the two most likely to be approved next.

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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