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Digital asset treasury company Evernorth Holdings, Inc. and SPAC company Armada Acquisition Corp. II announced that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has declared the S-4 registration statement related to their proposed business combination effective. This registration statement covers up to 11,499,992 shares of Class A common stock that may be issued and sold upon the exercise of warrants, calculated at an exercise price of $11.50 per share, corresponding to a scale of approximately $132.2 million.According to the arrangement, Armada shareholders registered as of August 20, 2026, will hold a special meeting on September 30, 2026, to vote on the transaction. If the transaction is approved and customary closing conditions are met, the combined company is expected to be listed on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol "XRPN," with the transaction anticipated to be completed by the end of the third quarter or the beginning of the fourth quarter of 2026. Asheesh Birla, founder and CEO of Evernorth, stated that the effectiveness of the registration statement is an important milestone in completing the proposed business combination.Evernorth is positioned as a digital asset treasury company aimed at building institutional-level XRP economic exposure, planning to deploy funds into the XRP ecosystem through strategies designed to enhance the per-share XRP holdings. Its investors include Arrington Capital, SBI Group, Ripple, Pantera Capital, Kraken, and GSR.

Ripple's brokerage business Ripple Prime (formerly Hidden Road) announced that institutional clients can now trade swap contracts linked to over 100 stocks, commodities, and foreign exchange markets around the clock, using the USD stablecoin RLUSD issued by Ripple as collateral. These swap contracts track perpetual futures listed on the cryptocurrency derivatives exchange Hyperliquid by Trade.xyz, which have no expiration date and can be traded 24/7, allowing funds to build positions in assets like gold while traditional markets are closed. Ripple announced on October 15 that trading company Virtu is already using this service.HSBC's head of digital asset research, Daragh Maher, stated in a report sent to clients on Monday that this launch is "evolution rather than revolution." He wrote that it is a rapidly growing market but still far smaller than the traditional financial markets it tracks, and the product's appeal will be stronger only when the market has sufficient depth, allowing investors to express views and adjust risks while traditional markets are closed. HSBC expects early activity to focus on market makers, proprietary traders, and hedge funds seeking basis trading, rather than institutions looking for strategic hedging.The risks of weekend trading have already become apparent. Last Saturday, approximately $52 million in leveraged chip stock positions were forcibly liquidated within 10 minutes, with the sell-off spreading from Binance to Hyperliquid, while the underlying stocks were not trading, and the contracts lacked new stock market prices for reference. HSBC stated that Ripple's success depends on whether the service is cheaper, simpler, and can better utilize client collateral compared to existing brokers. The new swap business is offered under Ripple Prime's British Virgin Islands license, with plans to expand to more jurisdictions in the future.

The XRP Ledger vulnerability fix package named fixCleanup3_4_0 is expected to officially take effect around 09:34 UTC on October 23. This fix package has received votes from 29 validators, surpassing the threshold of over 80% approval among the network's default 35 validators, and must be maintained continuously for two weeks. The countdown has been ongoing for nine days. Since there is no margin in the vote count, if any validator withdraws support, the countdown will restart.This fix package partially addresses the unsecured lending system that Ripple has been promoting to banks and payment companies since June, but this system has not yet been activated. Currently, the lending amendment has only 19 votes, and the vault amendment for holding funds has 21 votes, neither of which has started the countdown. Therefore, even if both reach 29 votes today, the lending function will not be available until early November at the earliest.As designed, lenders will deposit XRP or other tokens into the vault, and loan brokers will then lend out the funds for a fixed term. The ledger is responsible for recording the loans and tracking repayments, while brokers assess the borrower's qualifications off-chain. Since borrowers do not need to provide collateral, the broker's judgment becomes the only guarantee for lenders against default losses. Ripple has promoted this scheme to payment companies that need liquidity during cross-border settlement. Additionally, the fix package also closes a vulnerability that allowed accounts authorized to destroy tokens to create new tokens under specific conditions and adjusts the rounding of vault amounts as well as the rules for determining loan overdue and default.

According to documents submitted by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on October 15, the political action committee Fairshake, primarily funded by Coinbase and Ripple Labs, has invested $46.6 million through its affiliated organization Defend American Jobs in the Ohio Senate election for media advertising opposing former Congressman Sherrod Brown's return to the Senate and supporting Republican incumbent Jon Husted. This expenditure is over 50% more than Fairshake's initial plan of $30 million announced in September.In an interview aired on Pod Save America on October 16, Brown responded that he has spent his entire career battling Wall Street, big pharmaceutical companies, and oil giants, achieving success in many cases, while Husted is a spokesperson for these forces, which is why they have invested tens of millions of dollars. In addition to Fairshake, the super PAC Digital Freedom Fund, established by Gemini co-founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, reported approximately $3 million in advertising expenditures this week to oppose Brown and support Husted, bringing the total media spending in the Ohio campaign to over $5.9 million. With less than three weeks until the U.S. elections, early voting in Ohio has been underway for 10 days.Fairshake's spending this round has exceeded $41 million for 2024, when the PAC supported Republican Bernie Moreno and opposed the incumbent Brown. Brown, who previously served as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, is one of the lawmakers in Congress openly questioning the laws and policies supported by the cryptocurrency industry. Defend American Jobs also reported spending over $6.7 million in the Nebraska Senate election opposing independent candidate Dan Osborn, whose opponent, Republican Pete Ricketts, voted in favor of the Digital Asset Market Structure Act and legislation related to stablecoins. Fairshake stated in January of this year that it held $193 million in cash before the election.

According to Bloomberg, Ripple's main brokerage division, Ripple Prime, is launching perpetual contracts for real-world assets (RWA) aimed at institutional clients, covering over 100 reference markets including stocks, indices, ETFs, and commodities. This product is offered through Trade.xyz on Hyperliquid, continuing Ripple Prime's previous strategy of opening up cryptocurrency perpetual contract trading to clients.This arrangement supports cross-position margin sharing. Michael Higgins, CEO of Ripple Prime International, stated that this move helps institutions improve capital efficiency and position management. Clients can pair perpetual contracts with underlying assets for basis trading or use the contracts for directional trading to gain exposure to relevant assets during traditional market closures and on weekends.In the past year, the open interest of RWA perpetual contracts on several major trading platforms has increased from nearly zero to $9 billion. Higgins also mentioned that traditional hedge funds are "very close" to directly participating in the tokenized RWA market, with the key being the establishment of infrastructure that meets their counterparty and anti-money laundering requirements.

According to The Block, brokerage service provider DriveWealth has partnered with Ripple to integrate its stablecoin settlement, cross-border payment, and digital asset custody services into its brokerage platform.The two parties will initially launch settlement operations in Europe and plan to expand the service scope to the United States. This integration will utilize the Ripple RLUSD stablecoin on the XRP Ledger, allowing DriveWealth customers to use a stablecoin that can be converted to fiat currency almost in real-time for collateral account funding and management. Additionally, both parties are exploring opportunities for equity financing through Ripple Prime.

According to The Block, Evernorth, which holds an XRP treasury and is listed on Nasdaq, announced that it will begin deploying its XRP holdings through an "institutional strategy" starting in the fourth quarter, with initial partners including Ripple and cryptocurrency exchanges Kraken, Coinbase, and BitGo.The company currently holds 473 million XRP, valued at approximately $648 million at current prices. Two days before this announcement, Evernorth began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker XRPN after completing a deSPAC merger with Armada Acquisition Corp. II.Founder and CEO Asheesh Birla stated that the company is putting its treasury to work and is choosing to start with strong institutional trading counterparts within the industry. Evernorth's goal is to generate returns from its XRP holdings and increase the per-share holdings, rather than simply pursuing accumulation; the announcement did not specify how much XRP will be deployed. The company also plans to expand into lending and on-chain DeFi strategies once relevant features on the XRP Ledger are available.This strategy is led by newly appointed Chief Investment Officer Hugo Jeandesboz, who previously served as Co-Chief Investment Officer at Coinbase Asset Management. Jeandesboz stated that this requires a set of treasury strategies, a risk framework, and counterparties that can be clearly explained to the board of directors of the listed company. The XRPN stock price has remained relatively flat since opening at $16.68 on Monday, closing at $16.48 on Tuesday, and slightly rising to $16.6 in after-hours trading.

Ripple announced the integration of the wallet technology from Privy, a subsidiary of Stripe, into the XRP Ledger, allowing financial applications and AI agents to create accounts, hold cryptocurrency assets, and complete payments without users needing to manage wallet software themselves. Developers can create wallets within their own products and authorize transfers involving XRP, the US dollar stablecoin RLUSD issued by Ripple, and other network assets. Privy is responsible for the wallet infrastructure, reducing the workload for application developers while supporting the export of private keys or mnemonic phrases for wallet migration to other platforms.This integration also allows AI agents or automated bots to hold funds and automatically pay for online data and service fees. Privy documentation states that wallets running on enterprise servers can allow software to hold and spend funds, including purchasing data access services through the x402 payment standard. J. Ayo Akinyele, head of engineering at RippleX, stated that the network has processed over 13 million agent payments via x402, accounting for about 25% of ledger activity. Data from the XRPL AI Hub operated by payment infrastructure developer t54 shows that as of Wednesday, cumulative transactions exceeded 14.3 million, covering 169 registered merchants.However, the cumulative transfer amount is much smaller than the scale suggested by the number of transactions, with the dashboard recording cumulative payments of approximately 6,991 XRP and 12,752 RLUSD, most transaction amounts being very small. Ripple began providing related tools to developers in June and expanded support for payment standards developed by Stripe and payment blockchain Tempo in September.

Standard Chartered Bank announced that it has launched institutional custody services for Ripple's stablecoin RLUSD through its Dubai International Financial Centre branch, supporting the operation of this stablecoin on the XRP Ledger, allowing qualified institutional clients to use its digital asset custody infrastructure.Standard Chartered plans to extend the collateral mirroring model to institutional trading company LMAX Group, allowing clients to use RLUSD as trading collateral while the tokens remain held in the bank's custody. This model enables LMAX to confirm the value of qualified RLUSD holdings without requiring clients to transfer tokens, which Standard Chartered claims reduces transfer-related risks and helps institutions manage counterparty exposure.The issuer of RLUSD, Ripple, and LMAX Group announced a partnership in January 2026 to expand the institutional use of this stablecoin. Standard Chartered stated that the new collateral functionality still needs to meet conditions such as final documentation, testing, regulatory requirements, and internal approvals.

Regarding the critical vulnerability in the payment engine reported by Veria AI, RippleX engineering lead J. Ayo Akinyele stated that the XRP Ledger (XRPL) payment engine has a serious vulnerability that has existed for over 10 years, which could lead to the issuance of XRP beyond its fixed supply. This vulnerability was discovered through a bug bounty program and has not yet been exploited.The development team has released the xrpld 3.4.1 patch version and coordinated with validators to complete the network upgrade before public disclosure. Akinyele mentioned that AI is accelerating the speed of vulnerability discovery, and XRPL will increase proactive security investments, clean up technical debt, advance formal verification, and systematically eliminate potential risks in old code.

Digital asset treasury company Evernorth Holdings, Inc. announced that it has completed its business combination with special purpose acquisition company Armada Acquisition Corp. II. Armada was initiated by Arrington XRP Capital Fund, LP. Evernorth aims to provide institutional access to the XRP ecosystem at scale, with common stock expected to begin trading on Nasdaq under the ticker XRPN on October 12, 2026, and ringing the Nasdaq closing bell on October 14.At the time of closing, the company holds approximately 473 million XRP and has raised about $300 million in gross cash proceeds (before transaction expenses). Investors include Arrington Capital, SBI Group, Ripple, Pantera Capital, Kraken, GSR, and others. Founder and CEO Asheesh Birla stated that the goal is to establish an actively managed XRP treasury to support ecosystem growth and meet public market demands for transparency and governance.The company stated that as institutional on-chain finance develops, the need for capital expansion in tokenized assets, on-chain credit markets, and settlement infrastructure arises. Evernorth intends to be a source of such capital and operate according to the reporting, governance, and disclosure standards of Nasdaq-listed companies. Michael Arrington, founder of Arrington Capital, stated that support for Evernorth is an extension of its XRP thesis, which will bring scalable capital, active participation, and public company standards.

Chris Larsen, co-founder of Ripple and crypto billionaire, is increasing his investment in the U.S. political arena. Disclosure data shows that during this midterm election cycle, Larsen has directly donated at least $22.5 million to federal candidates and super political action committees (super PACs), and plans to further increase his contributions.Currently, Larsen has become one of the important donors in U.S. federal politics, with areas of focus including artificial intelligence, clean energy, cryptocurrency, and wealth taxes. He has previously been an active political donor in the U.S. technology and cryptocurrency sectors.

On October 8, the XRP Ledger activated the PermissionDelegationV1_1 feature, allowing account owners to authorize other accounts to perform specific tasks without relinquishing control of the account's master key. According to the monitoring site XRPL Dashboard, such upgrades require over 80% support from trusted validators for two consecutive weeks; based on the current 35 validators, at least 29 must support it. The countdown for this feature was reset in September due to the support rate falling below the threshold.This feature allows enterprises to split permissions by function. Stablecoin issuers can authorize compliant accounts to approve new customers while keeping the master key offline. Authorized accounts use their own keys to sign and can only perform the granted operations; owners can change or revoke these permissions at any time. Each authorized account can receive up to 10 permissions, which limit the types of operations they can perform, rather than automatically setting spending limits. Banks have previously separated payment and compliance responsibilities at the employee level, and this upgrade enforces such division at the ledger level.According to a report shared by Evernorth, a subsidiary of XRP Treasury, the network held an average of $3.72 billion in tokenized assets and $539 million in Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin in the second quarter, totaling approximately $4.26 billion. Official guidance advises users not to delegate PaymentBurn permissions before separately fixing activation; this permission is intended for assistants to destroy tokens but, under certain conditions, also allows for the creation of new tokens. This warning pertains to tokens issued on the ledger rather than newly minted XRP.

The cryptocurrency payment company Ripple has expanded into stablecoins, asset custody, and has entered the long-term leveraged exchange-traded fund (ETF) swap financing sector, which has been dominated by large banks, becoming an important participant. According to The Wall Street Journal, leveraged ETF managers achieve target returns through total return swaps and other derivatives, such as amplifying the daily fluctuations of a particular stock or index; banks or brokers sell related contracts and charge fees, then buy stocks or derivatives to hedge their own exposure.According to Morningstar Direct, there are 593 leveraged ETFs in the United States, managing over $256 billion in assets, of which 426 are single-stock leveraged funds, a category that received regulatory approval in 2022. Ripple entered swap financing after acquiring the prime broker Hidden Road, which caters to cryptocurrency hedge funds last year; this business is now called Ripple Prime, which is collaborating with multiple ETF providers and hopes to expand to include other investment managers, including hedge funds.On Tuesday, Ripple Prime announced it would provide prime brokerage, clearing, and financing services to the hedge fund Brevan Howard. Ripple Prime President Noel Kimmel stated that this is a growing and significant part of the company's business. The report cited an example where a fund paid Ripple at a rate of 4 percentage points above the overnight bank financing rate, which as of Tuesday was approximately equivalent to 8% of the fund's assets on an annualized basis; this cost is included in the net asset value of the leveraged fund, separate from the approximately 1% management fee.

According to The Block, Ripple announced a deepening of its cooperation with the global hedge fund Brevan Howard, which will adopt the multi-asset prime brokerage, clearing, and financing services provided by Ripple Prime, further expanding the use of Ripple's institutional-grade financial infrastructure and digital asset products.Brevan Howard currently manages approximately $35 billion in assets, and its Group Chief Operating Officer Alan McGroarty stated that as digital assets increasingly integrate with traditional financial markets, the demand for digital asset infrastructure from institutions continues to grow. Ripple's platform is expected to enhance the operational efficiency and capital utilization of investment teams.This cooperation is built on the existing investment relationship between the two parties. Brevan Howard had previously invested in Ripple and participated in its strategic financing round last year, which amounted to $500 million. Ripple Prime is the institutional-grade prime brokerage platform launched by Ripple after acquiring Hidden Road for $1.25 billion in 2025.

OKX founder and CEO Star posted that he welcomes Circle, Ripple, and SC Ventures as investors in OKX. OKX is not raising funds due to financial needs but is choosing to bring in strategic partners who share a long-term vision consensus with OKX in areas such as stablecoins, payments, institutional markets, and next-generation financial infrastructure.ChainCatcher previously reported that, according to Bloomberg, the cryptocurrency exchange platform OKX completed a new round of financing with a valuation of $25 billion, with existing partners and hedge fund Qube Research & Technologies participating in the investment.OKX stated that Circle Internet Group, Ripple, and SC Ventures, the investment arm of Standard Chartered Bank, all participated in this round of financing. OKX declined to disclose the specific amount of financing but indicated that this round is an extension of the financing from March of this year. At that time, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), invested approximately $200 million in OKX at the same $25 billion valuation.

Ripple and the XRP Ledger Foundation have jointly established a new organization, XRP Asia, headquartered in Singapore, focusing on ecological development in the Asia-Pacific region. The organization is led by Sabrina Tachdjian, who previously managed the Asia-Pacific and fintech and payment operations at the Hedera Foundation and oversaw blockchain investments at LINE.XRP Asia will provide learning resources, system integrator collaboration programs, hackathons, office hours, and product implementation guidance for developers and startups. Market expansion support includes partner referrals, incubation and funding project connections, founder story dissemination, and introductions to relevant investors.The organization will rely on the existing communities of XRPL Korea and XRPL Japan and assist in establishing new communities in major cities and development hubs across Asia. Officials stated that Asia has long been an important region for the XRP Ledger, with an active digital asset market, developers, and the XRP community.

According to Onchain Lens monitoring, Ripple unlocked a total of 1 billion XRP from the custody account through 4 transactions within a few minutes, worth approximately 1.49 billion dollars, specifically 400 million, 300 million, 200 million, and 100 million.

The regulated operator responsible for the registration, securities custody, and settlement system of the Brazilian financial market, CSD BR, has begun to record the ownership of shares in certain investment funds under BTG Pactual, mirroring them to the public XRP Ledger. CSD BR manages registered assets exceeding 22 trillion Brazilian Reais, approximately 4 trillion US dollars. Its existing database still serves as the official record for registration, custody, and settlement, and the relevant assets have not been transferred to the XRP Ledger; fund shares will be presented in token form on the XRPL.This blockchain copy aims to allow approved banks and institutions to verify ownership changes in real-time, replacing post-reconciliation, reducing the slow and costly verification process, while retaining identity checks and regulatory controls. Anyone can read the token circulation on the XRPL, but CSD BR still controls who has the right to hold and transfer these tokens. The tokens adopt the multi-purpose token standard of the XRP Ledger, allowing issuers to restrict participants and freeze assets or revoke transactions upon regulatory or court requests, while participants still need to pass identity and anti-money laundering checks.The project starts with real fund records, distinguishing it from previous pilots that used test assets or closed networks. CSD BR was established in 2018 and is authorized by the Central Bank of Brazil and the securities regulatory authority. After becoming familiar with the mirroring system, CSD BR and Ripple plan to test the direct issuance of assets on the XRP Ledger and allow approved participants to trade, with potential targets including Brazilian real estate receivables and agricultural receivables.