An open letter from Asheesh Birla, Chief Executive Officer, Evernorth
October 9, 2026
Your car can drive itself. Your money still isn’t. I believe that is changing.
This morning a car without a human driver could have taken you to the airport. A drone may have set your groceries on the porch. But if you owed a friend $200 for last week’s game tickets, you probably paid them with a product invented when Bill Clinton was president.
PayPal was founded in 1998 and, almost thirty years later, it is still the reference point for what a consumer finance company looks like. But PayPal hasn’t fixed how money moves. It built a workaround, a private ledger that sits on top of the existing banking system, so two people can settle with each other immediately while the banks underneath them can take days. One of the most successful payments companies of the internet era is, at heart, a layer built over public infrastructure that could not do the job. That says less about PayPal than it does about the plumbing it had to route around.
Look at the largest companies in the Nasdaq-100 index. You will find chipmakers, cloud, software, rockets, electric cars and a coffee chain. What you will not find anywhere near the top are financial technology companies. As I write this, dozens of technology companies in the index are worth more than $100 billion.. It does not appear that any of them were built in the internet era as financial infrastructure. The few fintech companies we got were built as apps on the old rails. The platform to reinvent finance was not ready yet.
I believe it now is and, within five years, much of the most important new financial infrastructure will be built on blockchains, by companies that look more like technology firms that partner with financial institutions. Why hasn’t it happened already? Two barriers, and both are starting to come down.
The first is plumbing. In 1968, Wall Street was so buried in paper stock certificates that the New York Stock Exchange closed on Wednesdays to catch up. The fix, built in the early 1970s, is largely the system we still use in 2026. A trade you make today settles tomorrow. A wire sent after dinner on Friday often waits for Monday. The main U.S. trading session still closes at 4 pm ET, as though money needs to sleep. Every hour money waits is an hour it is not working. That is the plumbing PayPal had to route around, and it is still here. Blockchains move as fast as a text message. The traditional financial system underneath it has been moving at the speed of 1973.
The second is rules. Cars did not need an act of Congress to drive themselves. Money does. Finance runs on trust, and trust at scale is written into law. For most of the past 15 years, blockchain sat in a gray zone where a serious institution could not build on it without betting the firm on a future court ruling. I believe that era is beginning to come to a close. In 2025, the U.S. passed its first federal law for payment stablecoins. I anticipate rules for the rest of the market to follow.
So when the plumbing exists and the law is starting to catch up, what gets built?
The pitch for blockchain has always been speed, an immutable record of truth and lower cost. All true, but the internet did not matter because pages loaded faster than a fax. It mattered because of what people built once information could be programmed. Finance is next, and tokenization is the word for it. A stock, a bond, a dollar, a share of an office tower becomes a digital object, and now can be programmed. It can move instantly at three in the morning on a Sunday. It can also pay its own interest, release itself the moment a shipment lands, move with appropriate privacy protections, or be pledged, borrowed against and lent out, with rules written into the asset itself.
None of this works without a market that is actually there when you need it. Someone has to be willing to buy when you sell and sell when you buy. Today that role is concentrated in a relatively small number of firms, largely during market hours. On open ledgers it can happen around the clock, where anyone can check the depth of the market themselves. Deep, transparent markets and capital put to work are what can turn a technology into a financial system.
That is the work Evernorth is designed to do. We intend to help build this system rather than wait for it by putting our capital to work on the XRP Ledger, supporting liquidity, and working alongside the builders creating the tools institutions will need. In the open, as a public company. We would rather be a participant in this transformation than a spectator of it.
The internet was built to host information and only later learned to carry commerce. Blockchains were built the other way around. They are financial infrastructure by birth. For fifteen years, the question has been whether institutions could use them. I believe that question is closing, and the one replacing it is how much of the world’s financial activity will move onto them. My answer is more than most people in finance expect, and sooner.
Asheesh Birla,
Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Evernorth
Nasdaq: XRPN
Forward-Looking Statements. This letter contains forward-looking statements, including statements about the future of financial markets, regulation, tokenization and Evernorth’s strategy. They reflect the author’s current views and are not guarantees of future events. Actual results may differ materially due to factors including the volatility of XRP and other digital assets, changes in laws and regulations, Evernorth’s ability to execute its strategies, and the other risks described under “Risk Factors” in Evernorth’s SEC filings. Evernorth undertakes no obligation to update these statements except as required by law. This letter is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security.