Photo from one of the first XRP community events, San Francisco, 2013.
XRP's Most Underrated Feature: The Community
By Asheesh Birla, founder and CEO, Evernorth
Ask what makes XRP different and you’ll most often get a technical answer. Settles in seconds. Transactions cost a fraction of a cent. Built from the start to move value rather than sit still. All true, but also missing the most important element. .
The list is missing you.
A ledger’s speed can be matched by the next ledger. But a constituency that has held together for a decade cannot be matched at all. That belongs on this list of what sets XRP apart and I’d put it near the top.
Which brings me to what we’re doing about it.
Every fight starts with a bell. So does every trading day. Same sound, different building, but both mean the same thing: whatever you did to get here is finished. Now, everybody gets to watch.
Evernorth expects to list on Nasdaq under the ticker XRPN. If and when that bell rings, we don’t plan to walk out alone. We’re walking out with an XRP community member, BearChamp.
Here’s why that matters, and it isn’t about a mascot.
You were early, and you were loud about it
Most communities in this industry were built during a bull run and dissolved during the next drawdown. Yours did the opposite. It got written off, argued with, counted out in public, and it kept showing up. Building wallets and explorers and dashboards nobody paid for, translating documentation into a dozen languages, answering the same question for the ten thousandth newcomer without a trace of condescension.
And you did something with almost no precedent in American securities litigation. When the SEC challenged XRP’s legal standing, thousands of XRP holders organized, retained counsel, and put their names on the record. The attorney who filed on their behalf, John Deaton, has said he submitted roughly 3,800 holder affidavits, and by the amicus deadline fourteen briefs had been filed in support of XRP’s standing. Deaton has argued publicly since that holders changed the shape of the case. The point is that thousands of individual holders, with no budget and no institutional standing, made themselves impossible to ignore inside a federal proceeding. That’s more than a fan base. That’s a constituency.
That is a strange and rare thing to watch from the outside. Conviction is easy when you’re winning. This community has something else, and there isn’t a clean word for it in finance. Stubborn belief, maybe. The refusal to let somebody else’s opinion be the final word on what you already understood.
We’re close to becoming a public company, and public companies are supposed to talk about total addressable markets. Fine. But we should be honest about what actually got XRP here. A market, absolutely. But, moreover, the people who wouldn’t leave.
Why BearChamp: A celebration of the XRP community
If you’re in this community, you already know him. If you’re not, BearChamp is a fighter, invented to stand in for a fight somebody wasn’t allowed to have.
JC Rivera, the Chicago-based artist behind BearChamp, grew up in Puerto Rico wanting to be a boxer. His mother thought the ring was too dangerous, and the art world wasn’t handing out much encouragement either. Years later, working multiple jobs and drawing on a $150 computer he’d picked up at a pawn shop, he made a stout, mustard-colored bear with heavy eyes, red gloves and a crown. He’d created a proxy for the fighter he was told he couldn’t become. The Champ came with a directive that hasn’t changed: roll with the punches.
JC put him on walls. Wheatpastes in the margins first, then a commissioned mural in 2014 that put the bear in front of a much bigger audience, then most of Wicker Park and the West Loop. From there, the Champ went where JC went, including vinyl toys, canvases, and whatever the digital frontier turns out to be. But at every turn, he takes the hit, finds his feet, and never stops swinging.
We picked BearChamp for this moment because his story is uncomfortably close to ours. A contender with unexpected pedigree. Somebody who rolls up his sleeves, does the unglamorous work, takes the shot, gets back up, and is still standing when the people who dismissed him have moved on to dismissing something else.
That is the XRP community’s story. It’s also, at the risk of being sentimental about a balance sheet, ours.
What we’re actually doing
BearChamp and Evernorth are collaborating on the road to the bell.
You’ll see a co-branded symbol you can wear, post and rally behind. You’ll see the story told in chapters between now and the day we hope to ring the bell. And if all goes as planned, it culminates in a full takeover of Times Square, where the finale of the story premieres. BearChamp stepping through the ropes into public markets.
We wanted you to have something to hold on to. Going public is, structurally, a private moment. It happens in filings and conference rooms and on a podium at 9:30 in the morning with people in suits. That’s not a complaint, it’s just the shape of the thing. But the people who carried this asset for a decade shouldn’t be reading about that moment secondhand.
Our collaboration with BearChamp, along with other XRP community members, is this community’s seat at ringside.
He’s the first. He isn’t the only one.
The XRP community produced a genuine creative culture: artists, animators, meme historians, developers who ship on weekends, people who have explained the ledger to their families more times than they’d like to admit. BearChamp is one of them, and we’re starting there. We have plans for more.
The through-line won’t change. This community is resilient and self-organizing and, frankly, funnier than any other corner of the digital asset ecosystem. We intend to keep celebrating that instead of borrowing from it.
And while the show is on, the work continues.
We still have the actual job to do.
Evernorth intends to put its XRP to work, actively managing it as a working treasury. We’ll be treating the treasury the way a serious financial firm treats a balance sheet. We intend to work directly with builders on the XRP Ledger.
The ledger has quietly grown up over the last two years. Permissioned trading venues, native escrow, on-chain lending, a regulated dollar stablecoin operating in the same ecosystem. That is the kind of infrastructure institutions have said they need. As institutions evaluate whether to move real activity onto public infrastructure, somebody has to make sure this community is inside that story rather than reading about it after the fact.
That’s the part of the job we take most personally. You made XRP matter before it was respectable to say so. You should be in the room when the rest of finance figures it out.
See you at the bell
This is a moment this community earned long before we existed.
The walkout has already started. We’re ready for the next era of finance.
This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, nor does it constitute investment advice. It reflects the personal views of the author. This content may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties; actual results may differ materially. Digital assets involve risk, including potential loss of principal. Evernorth has filed a registration statement (available at sec.gov) with the SEC in connection with a proposed business combination. Learn more about Evernorth: https://www.evernorth.xyz/press-release-08-27-2026