Evernorth expects its Armada SPAC merger to close Wednesday with $48 million in trust

Evernorth expects its merger with the SPAC Armada Acquisition Corp. II to close on Wednesday, Oct. 7, subject to remaining conditions, the XRP treasury company told CoinDesk. The shell's shares closed Friday at $39.42, up 68% on the day and about 273% for the week, having briefly touched $53 against a $10.58 close a week earlier, according to StockAnalysis data, with pre-market trading Monday adding another 9.5%.

A SPAC raises money into a trust and merges with a private company later, and its public shareholders hold a right that an ordinary buyer of stock does not: they can ask for their cash back before the deal closes instead of taking shares in the combined business. Armada's trust held $241.2 million at the end of June at a redemption value of about $10.49 per public share, according to its quarterly filing, while Evernorth's Oct. 1 announcement indicates that roughly $48 million in trust proceeds will remain for the transaction, about 80% of the trust going back to shareholders, and no final count of redeemed shares.

Absent that count, the arithmetic is blunt: investors who asked for their $10.49 took it, while anyone still holding at Friday's close is marking the same claim at nearly four times that amount, and with fewer public shares left to trade, relatively small orders can move a quote sharply. That gap between redemption value and Friday's close is either a loud statement about the tokens the company is about to own or a statement about how few shares are left to buy—and CoinDesk's reporting points at the second.

The $48 million from the trust joins a balance sheet: at closing, Evernorth expects to hold approximately 473 million XRP, about $714 million at Monday's price of roughly $1.51, alongside approximately $300 million in gross cash proceeds before expenses, of which $225 million comes from private placements, $30 million from convertible notes and $48 million from Armada's trust; backers have also contributed XRP directly. Related coverage frames the vehicle as backed by Ripple and, at the time of that piece, a shareholder vote away from a Nasdaq listing.

The company spent $214.1 million buying 84.4 million XRP through the end of 2025, an average of about $2.54, according to a March report, and at Monday's price that tranche is worth roughly $127 million, about 40% below what was paid for it.

Of the roughly $300 million in gross cash the deal claims before expenses, the SPAC's trust supplies $48 million—about a sixth—and private placements and convertible notes supply the rest, meaning the listing is being financed mostly by private-placement and convertible-note buyers rather than by the public shareholders the trust was assembled around.

The vehicles that listed earlier set a low bar: Twenty One, the Tether-backed treasury company, fell 25% in early trading on its NYSE debut in December and traded near the $10 its private-placement investors had paid, while ProCap BTC had lost more than 60% since its own merger by the time Twenty One listed. A 273% week on a shrunken float does not overturn that record so much as suggest the move is being made by scarcity.

The case for the wrapper is custody of a counterparty: an allocator can buy XRP on any venue, but what a listed treasury company adds is a name with a board and a disclosure calendar attached to the tokens. This publication argued in September that onchain finance's real product is a counterparty you can name, and a single-token treasury company is that proposition in concentrated form, with one asset and no operating layer between the holder and the price—quarterly filings that state the token count are the part of this a spot holding cannot supply.

Concentration cuts the other way: a holder of the merged company takes the full move of a token that trades around the clock on venues the company does not control, and whose disclosed cost basis on at least one tranche sits well above the market. What the equity does after Wednesday and what XRP does are not the same question, and the first one will be answered partly by how many shares are actually out there.

XRP's own infrastructure runs on a separate clock: the ledger's atomic-settlement upgrade slipped to Oct. 9, a reminder that the tokens in the treasury ride rails whose release dates move at validator speed.

Two numbers due in Evernorth's closing disclosures will settle what the combined company is—the final share count and the cash left after expenses—and Evernorth has given Wednesday as the closing date, subject to remaining conditions.