Asheesh Birla has spent 13 years in blockchain. He has watched $XRP go from a niche asset discussed in specialist forums to a live ticker on CNBC. He has seen institutional adoption go from a theoretical future to a present-tense reality. And yet he is sitting in the middle of what he describes, with genuine puzzlement, as one of the strangest markets he has ever seen.
“We’ve been waiting for this moment for so long,” Birla, CEO of Evernorth, told Paul Barron in a recent interview. “Adoption and tokenization are shattering records. You’ve got adoption taking off, doubling in a lot of use cases. But price is sort of lagging behind.”
The gap between fundamental progress and market price is the defining tension of the current cycle, and Birla does not pretend to have a clean explanation for it. Macro conditions, geopolitical uncertainty, and rate environment headwinds are doing work that the underlying adoption story cannot fully overcome. For now.
The Institutional Tide Has Turned
For Birla, the most significant development is not any single product or partnership. It is the shift in how the mainstream financial world is talking about blockchain.
“You turn on CNBC and how many segments do they run today on blockchain?” he said. “It’s my 13th year in blockchain. I was waiting for the moment they would be talking about the positive things. $XRP is on the ticker. I remember when we dreamt about one day $XRP is going to be on the ticker. And here we are.”
That moment, the one the community spent years imagining, has arrived quietly and without the fanfare many expected. The mainstream financial press is covering crypto on its merits. Regulatory clarity is making front pages.
A new crop of investors is coming in, many of them through traditional brokerage accounts rather than crypto-native platforms, precisely the audience Evernorth is designed to serve.
