Evernorth CEO’s Ripple origin story: XRP’s early role comes back into focus
Ashish Birla, CEO of institutional firm Evernorth, has been revisiting Ripple’s rough early days and the thinking behind XRP. The timing is not subtle. Evernorth is expected to list on Nasdaq under the ticker XRPN, and Birla’s comments drag XRP back into the payments and liquidity conversation Ripple has wanted for years. Not just the daily price-chart fight. My take: that shift matters more than the nostalgia.
Birla’s interview with Vet from the XRPL Foundation, titled “‘It Was Magic’: Evernorth CEO Lifts Curtain on Early Days of Ripple and XRP,” goes back to late 2013. Ripple was working out of a plain Second Street office in San Francisco. No air conditioning. Desks the team had to build themselves. Co-founder Chris Larsen kept pushing everyone to spend as little as possible so they could, in his words, “keep the lights on.” That detail cuts through the usual startup polish. Still, Birla says the energy in the room was “enormous,” with Arthur Britto working ideas out on whiteboards and David Schwartz explaining the consensus system. The team already believed XRP belonged at the center of the plan, as the base layer for what Ripple called the “Internet of Value.”
That idea was not just sitting in a pitch deck. In late 2013, Ripple ran its first retail test by getting the nearby Red Door Cafe to accept XRP payments. XRP was worth about two cents ($0.02) at the time. A latte bought with XRP then would be worth roughly $120 to $150 today, depending on the token price used for the comparison. Why does this matter? Because it shows XRP being used in a real payment setting before the market had its cleaner institutional vocabulary. Birla called it a kind of “Bitcoin pizza” moment. Fair comparison, maybe a little neat. But it sticks.
Evernorth now says it holds 473 million XRP on its balance sheet and plans to use the XRP Ledger as a base layer for regulated DeFi products. The company wants to offer retail investors yield products on terms closer to what large funds can access. Here is where I would slow down. Most crypto origin stories try to make the early chaos look prophetic. That’s only half right. The better test is whether regulated products can run on XRPL in a way investors use and regulators accept. After years of legal pressure around XRP, a Nasdaq-bound company building directly on the ledger would matter if it moves from announcement to working product.
.@ashgoblue on the very early days at Ripple.
He said: “We knew this was going to be big, with $XRP as the foundation layer at the core of it.”
“You could feel the energy in the office.”
“Arthur was at the whiteboard, while David was in the other room talking about the $XRP… pic.twitter.com/8j9pdp17a7— Vet (@Vet_X0) June 19, 2026
Birla’s use of words like “magic” will land with longtime XRP holders. I’ll be honest: the less romantic point is the one worth keeping. XRP was built for fast settlement, cross-border payments, and asset movement. Those ideas are back in the market as banks test tokenized assets. Central banks are studying CBDCs. Payment firms are still hunting for cheaper settlement rails. Counter to the usual advice, this does not mean XRP wins because it was early. It means the old Ripple pitch sounds a lot less odd than it did in 2013.
What this means
Birla’s comments suggest XRP is getting another institutional look, this time with more regulatory packaging around it. For holders, that fits the old argument: XRP’s value case depends on use as a bridge asset and settlement layer, not just speculative demand. Is that enough by itself? No. Evernorth’s plan to build regulated DeFi products on the XRP Ledger gives that argument something specific to point to. If those products launch and users show up, the market will have more than a founding story to price.
Investors should watch Evernorth’s planned Nasdaq listing under XRPN and any follow-up details on its XRPL products. We tried to separate the clean signal from the hype here, and the listing is the first clean signal. It will show how public markets treat a company with heavy XRP exposure. Price action around the listing will matter too, especially whether XRP can hold major support levels if the news cycle gets crowded or messy. Yes, that sounds like it contradicts the point about product usage being the bigger test. It does not. The listing is the market’s first reaction; product launches, assets committed, and actual usage are the harder evidence.