San Francisco-based company Ripple has announced the introduction of US Treasury bills on the XRP Ledger via tokenization platform OpenEden. Treasury bills are short-term debt obligations backed by the U.S. government. More than $1 billion worth of U.S. treasury notes have already been tokenized on public blockchains of the likes of Polygon, Ethereum, and Stellar. Ripple has also allocated $10 million to TBILL tokens issued by OpenEden.
Markus Infanger, senior vice president at RippleX, has stated that the bills represent another example of how it is possible to tokenize real-world assets. He added that institutions are actively exploring tokenization opportunities. Tokenized versions of Treasury bills help investors diversify their portfolios.
As reported by U.Today, Ripple outlined its vision for tokenization earlier this year. It named such key benefits of tokenization as ensuring transparency, promoting greater security, and enabling greater access. Traditional banks and asset management funds are expected to be the key financial industry sectors that will be disrupted by tokenization.
In March, financial behemoth BlackRock launched its own tokenization fund called BUIDT, which currently accounts for nearly a third of the market. Earlier this month, the market capitalization of the BUIDL token topped the $500 million mark. It is used as a backing asset for the yield products of DeFi players such as Ondo Finance.
Last year, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink touted tokenization as the next big thing in crypto, predicting that it could boost the efficiency of capital markets. Earlier this year, Meld Gold announced that tokenized versions of gold and silver would also appear on the XPP Ledger in the third quarter of the year.