Evernorth Hires Former Coinbase Investment Chief to Lead XRP Treasury Ahead of Nasdaq Listing
Evernorth taps former Coinbase exec to manage XRP treasury
XRP treasury company Evernorth named Hugo Jeandesboz, former co-chief investment officer at Coinbase Asset Management, as its investment chief on Monday, October 12. The move comes just as Evernorth prepares for its Nasdaq listing.
The appointment follows the completion of Evernorth's SPAC merger with Armada Acquisition Corp. II on Friday. A SPAC is a shell company that merges with a private firm to take it public without a traditional IPO.
What the company holds at closing
At the close of the merger, Evernorth reported holding 473 million XRP tokens. At current prices, those holdings were worth roughly $672 million. The company also had $300 million in cash before transaction expenses.
Based on Bitcoin Treasuries data, that value places Evernorth just outside the 20 largest publicly traded corporate crypto holders.
Key details
- Jeandesboz will lead treasury allocation, liquidity management, and active management of Evernorth's XRP holdings under founder and CEO Asheesh Birla.
- At Coinbase, Jeandesboz led investment strategies for the exchange's institutional clients and previously served as lead derivatives trader.
- Evernorth plans to move beyond a simple buy-and-hold strategy by deploying XRP through lending, providing liquidity, and other yield strategies to grow its XRP-per-share metric.
- The company will trade under the ticker symbol XRPN on Nasdaq.
What the CEO said about the strategy
CEO Asheesh Birla said capturing opportunities in XRP lending and decentralized finance (DeFi) — crypto-native platforms for lending and trading without intermediaries — requires someone who has priced risk on institutional desks in both traditional and digital asset markets.
"We would rather be a participant in this transformation than a spectator of it," Birla wrote.
Turmoil in the stock price before closing
Armada II shares experienced sharp swings before the merger closed. The stock rose from around $10.68 over a two-week period to as high as $53 on October 2. It closed on Friday at $17.09 and then climbed to $18.57 in after-hours trading.
Sources
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