Evernorth has 473 million XRP and an argument to why idle capital should not exist

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Evernorth, a digital asset treasury (DAT) firm, has yet to go public, but it has already accumulated roughly 473 million XRP. Its plans alongside Ripple’s token extend beyond simply holding it, unlike firms like Strategy, one of the first firms to run a so-far successful DAT business model. According to its CEO Asheesh Birla, the company intends to put its capital to work onchain, and in doing so, help build a liquidity infrastructure for the XRP ecosystem.

Birla is focused on whether people are doing anything with their digital assets, or if they’re just holding them. The average U.S. retail bank account earns less than 1% interest, and most people that own digital assets do nothing with them. Corporations, despite having entire treasury departments, are often no better. 

For Evernorth, this presents a massive opportunity hiding in plain sight.

"People are leaving so much on the table. Corporates are leaving so much on the table because of the inefficiencies in global markets," he said, illustrating his point with an example: when he served on the board of a large remittance company, he’d see rows of employees manually managing global treasury operations.

Birla paints a vision of a world where idle capital is optimized in the background and assets are put to work in real time, earning yield until the moment they're needed to pay for something. He argues this is a programmability problem, and that blockchain can solve it. 

But what's missing is the real time, risk pricing infrastructure that can make such tasks safe and seamless at scale. He says Evernorth’s agentic risk engine is exactly what his team wants to build to solve this problem ahead of its eventual public listing.

Birla wants Evernorth's XRP holdings to be used in lending protocols, helping create liquidity on decentralized exchanges, and eventually facilitating use cases for new tokenized assets as they migrate to the XRP Ledger.

The problem with existing risk models in crypto is that they're borrowed from traditional finance, where end-of-day snapshots of markets that close at 4 p.m. is what’s needed. Crypto markets, however, run 24/7, which means the risk and pricing infrastructure needs to match how prices and collateral values move, Birla said. 

Building a risk engine that operates in real time is the prerequisite for everything else Evernorth wants to do.

Check out the next section for more details and the full episode.

For today’s episode, I interviewed Asheesh Birla, CEO of Evernorth, the Ripple-backed digital asset treasury firm holding roughly 473 million XRP tokens, to talk about why he thinks we've finally hit the inflection point that blockchain has been building toward for over a decade. 

Asheesh breaks down why most digital assets sit idle the same way cash sits in a bank account, how Evernorth is building a real-time agentic risk engine to change that, and why he believes the winners in this space will be the ones who develop the three pillars of tech, commercialization and liquidity.

TIMESTAMPS:

02:00 - The best use case for blockchains

04:16 - The pace of blockchain adoption vs expectations

08:15 - How Evernorth is creating liquidity for XRP and digital assets

10:00 - Industry misconceptions: tech vs adoption focus

11:33 - The Evernorth report findings for RLUSD and XRP 

14:11 - The significance of stablecoins for institutional markets

21:01 - The importance of asset optimization and real-time capital management

25:28 - How stablecoins strengthen crypto ecosystems rather than compete

30:33 - Idle capital as an overlooked signal and how to put assets to work

33:00 - Building trust and institutional confidence in blockchain

37:46 - The maturation of DeFi vaults and institutional-grade protocols

40:11 - Preparing Evernorth for listing and success metrics

46:42 - Long-term vision and advice for blockchain enthusiasts

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Please note this content is for informational and educational purposes only. Any views shared should not be considered financial advice, nor should it be used to make investment decisions. Cryptocurrencies are high risk and you should consult a financial professional before making any financial decisions. Make sure you do your own research. We may have a direct or indirect financial interest in content mentioned in this newsletter.