Inside Morgan Stanley’s XRP Shuffle: Three New ETFs and a Much Bigger SPAC Position

Morgan Stanley’s latest 13F is circulating on crypto social channels as evidence of an institutional XRP conviction call. The disclosed positions read as opportunistic, undersized and neutral, sized as a rounding error against the bank’s overall book.

The Q2 2026 filing, submitted Aug. 13, and reporting positions as of June 30 showed an entirely different XRP ETF lineup than Q1 plus a larger reported holding in Armada Acquisition Corp. II (NASDAQ:AACI), the SPAC pursuing a business combination with an XRP-focused digital-asset treasury. Every disclosed line item is small in absolute terms and microscopic in dollar context.

What the 13F Actually Disclosed

Three data points frame the institutional signal.

1. The Q2 XRP ETF lineup: Morgan Stanley reported 6,715 shares of the Franklin XRP ETF, 255 shares of the REX-Osprey XRP ETF and 67 shares of the Bitwise XRP ETF, for a combined 7,037 shares across the three products. The Q1 funds, 1,700 shares of the Volatility Shares XRP ETF and 100 shares of the Grayscale XRP ETF, did not appear in the Q2 filing. Morgan Stanley reported a completely different lineup one quarter later.

2. The SPAC position: The same filing disclosed 50,540 shares of Armada Acquisition Corp. II, the blank-check company whose proposed business combination with Evernorth Holdings would create an institutional XRP treasury vehicle intending to pursue strategies to increase XRP per share. Evernorth’s investor list includes Ripple, Arrington Capital, SBI Group, Pantera, Kraken, and GSR. Share counts across an ETF and a SPAC common share are not equivalent dollar exposure, so the 50,540 figure cannot be compared apples-to-apples with the 7,037 ETF shares.