Wall Street Upgraded Its Plumbing in the 90s. It’s About to Do It Again.
By Asheesh Birla, CEO, Evernorth
In the span of ten days last month, two things happened in Washington that most people outside of finance probably missed. What happened may mark the beginning of the end of a decade-long regulatory stalemate over digital assets.
On March 17, the SEC and CFTC issued their first-ever joint guidance classifying a group of digital assets, including XRP, digital commodities under existing federal law. The distinction matters enormously. It means these assets are treated as commodities for purposes of federal regulatory jurisdiction. It is, in effect, the federal government acknowledging that certain blockchain-based assets fall outside the securities framework. XRP already has this distinction following the court ruling between Ripple and the SEC, but enacting it into law would further clarify its regulatory designation.
Which brings us to the second thing that happened. Three days later, Senators Tillis and Alsobrooks announced a bipartisan compromise on the stablecoin yield provision that had been blocking the CLARITY Act, one of the most significant digital asset market structure bills to advance in Congress. A Banking Committee markup is now targeted for late April.
Neither headline, on its own, completes the picture. Together, they represent something the digital asset industry has never had at the same time: regulatory definition and legislative momentum.
I've been in this industry long enough to know that technology alone doesn't modernize financial systems. Markets transform when three things align: technology, regulation, and capital. We are watching that alignment happen now.
We've seen this pattern before
Consider the digitization of U.S. equity markets. In the early 1990s, less than 5 percent of NYSE trading volume was electronic. By 2009, virtually all of it was. The technology existed well before the transition, but the regulatory frameworks (particularly Regulation NMS, adopted by the SEC in 2005) and institutional willingness to commit capital to new technology was missing. However, once they arrived, the shift was fast and irreversible.
The global FX market really drives this home. In 1992 and 1993, Reuters and EBS launched the first electronic trading platforms for interbank spot foreign exchange, replacing voice brokerage with screens. But scale came from institutional forces in 2002: CLS, a payment-versus-payment settlement system built under pressure from the G20 central banks, went live in September that year. There was $1.2 trillion in daily global FX trading in 2001. As of 2022, there was approximately $7.5 trillion.
Digital assets are at the same inflection point: the technology arrived first, and the regulatory and capital layers are only now catching up.
The capital is showing up
Stablecoins have sustained approximately $300 billion in circulating supply, a functioning settlement layer for blockchain-based commerce and finance. Tokenized real-world assets, including U.S. Treasuries and credit instruments, have grown into the tens of billions across public blockchains. On the XRP Ledger specifically, RWA tokenization surged from $24.7 million at the start of 2025 to more than $2 billion by March 2026.
Institutional momentum is forming around XRP at a pace that didn't exist eighteen months ago. Spot XRP ETFs in the United States attracted more than $1 billion in net inflows after launching last year. On-chain, XRPL daily transaction counts recently reached a new all-time high of 4 million transactions. And just last month, a new survey from Coinbase and EY revealed that institutional investors plan to increase their XRP exposure from 18% to 25% this year.
These are the early markers of a market structure transition with capital expressing its view through regulated instruments and on-chain activity.
The question has changed
For most of XRP's history, the value proposition was settlement speed: move value across borders faster and cheaper than legacy rails. Settlement efficiency is a feature. Capital efficiency - how productively an asset can work on-chain as collateral, as a liquidity anchor, as the base layer for tokenized instruments - is the more consequential question for institutional participants.
The XRP Ledger recently hit approximately 27,000 automated market maker pools, with XRP pairs accounting for 92 percent of DEX trade routing. On-ledger lending, stablecoin issuance, real-time foreign exchange, and tokenized asset transfer are all operational on XRPL. The financial stack is being built.
The question for institutions now is how to deploy capital into it responsibly: with governance, with compliance, with risk management, and at scale.
Where Evernorth fits
Evernorth is a digital asset treasury company that, upon completion of its business combination with Armada Acquisition Corp. II, expects to be publicly listed on Nasdaq. The company has been designed to bridge public market capital and on-chain finance. We hold XRP and intend to deploy it into the growing financial infrastructure of the XRP Ledger by providing liquidity, participating in on-chain markets, and operating within a public-company framework that is audited, governed, and risk-managed.
Holding XRP directly and investing in Evernorth are different propositions. XRP is a digital asset. Evernorth is designed to provide investors with exposure to XRP's role in evolving financial infrastructure through active treasury management, not passive price exposure alone.
The long view
Every structural upgrade in financial markets felt uncertain at the beginning. Electronic trading did. Algorithmic execution did. ETFs did.
Each time, the pattern was the same. Technology led. Regulation followed. Capital committed. And once capital committed, the old architecture became legacy.
We are witnessing progression into the middle stages of that cycle in digital assets. The technology has proved itself. The regulation is now arriving. The capital is beginning to move. Evernorth is being built to provide institutional capital with a productive, governed entry point into this ecosystem.
Learn more: https://www.evernorth.xyz/press-release-10-20-2025