XRP Ledger Weighs Lending Upgrade as Evernorth's Nasdaq Vote Looms
Published on 09/22/2026 at 09:02 | Editorial boerse-global.de
A short squeeze swept through crypto markets yesterday, and XRP found itself at the center of it. After Bitcoin punched through the $84,700 mark, exchanges unwound bearish bets within the hour, forcing shorts to cover into a market that was already wound tight. The token changed hands at $1.52, up 7.8% on the day.
That burst of forced buying lands alongside a deeper structural story. Institutional players keep widening their footprint on the network, and the calendar is filling up with events that matter more than any single session's order flow.
A September 30 Shareholder Test
Evernorth, the crypto treasury vehicle, will put its merger with Armada Acquisition Corp. II to a shareholder vote on September 30. Once the SEC declares the filing effective, the combined entity is set to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker XRPN, with listing targeted for late in the third quarter or early in the fourth quarter of 2026.
The blueprint calls for a treasury reserve of roughly 473 million XRP. To shore that up, Evernorth has already signed a convertible bond agreement worth $30 million, backed by names including Ripple, the SBI Group, Pantera Capital and Kraken. The structure pulls the token directly onto the balance sheet of a future publicly traded US company — a channel market watchers view as another on-ramp for institutional capital.
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Validators Weigh a Lending Protocol
On the technical front, the XRP Ledger Foundation has released version 3.4.0 of the core xrpld software, putting new functional extensions to a validator vote. The headline item is Lending Protocol v1.1, which would bolt structured credit mechanisms onto the existing infrastructure.
Two amendments go to the validators: LendingProtocolV1_1 and fixCleanup3_4_0. At the same time, the older fixAMMOverflowOffer amendment is being dropped from the package. The lending push aims to expand the network's Single Asset Vaults, introducing closed vaults and cash-basis accounting. Under the proposal, those vaults would move through three fixed phases — subscription, investment and repayment. The software delivers the technical groundwork but does not switch the features on by itself.
Consensus rules mean any protocol change needs sustained approval from more than 80% of trusted validators over a continuous two-week stretch. Separately, the Foundation has migrated software distribution to freshly signed infrastructure, a shift that requires operators running older server versions to make adjustments.
The network's plumbing has also settled down. David Schwartz, Ripple CTO Emeritus, reported Friday that peer connections at his private hub had stabilized above the 500-participant threshold. At 501 connections, the figure sat close to the recent high of 509, with noticeably fewer disconnects.
Stablecoin Flows Shift, ETF Demand Cools
Demand in the regulated fund space keeps building. As of yesterday, the seven US spot XRP ETFs held a combined $2 billion in assets, with 1.1 billion tokens sitting in their custody accounts.
Settlement currency flows are moving too. For the first time, the larger share of Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin circulation sits on the XRP Ledger rather than Ethereum — roughly $810 million, or 51.7% of the total, now lives on the network.
Tokenization of traditional assets is gaining ground as well. Ondo Finance's OUSG fund holds $334.3 million on the ledger in the US Treasury segment, underpinned by fund shares from State Street and BlackRock, among others.
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Institutional appetite showed some softness last Thursday, when the US spot XRP ETFs logged net outflows of $5.15 million. Cumulative inflows into those products nonetheless remain at just under $1.71 billion. The failed CLARITY Act in the US Senate rattled sentiment about a week ago, yet XRP has still managed a 6.9% gain since then, though it slipped 0.7% on the day to $1.52.
A protocol adjustment, Batch V1.1, is due for mainnet activation on September 29. The update corrects earlier implementations and will bundle up to eight transactions from multiple accounts into a single ledger close.
For now, market participants have their eyes fixed on how validators vote on the new credit functions.
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