‘Growing investor appetite’ in tokenized fund space: UBS

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It’s been a minute since we checked in on the activity over in the tokenized fund space. 

Late Friday, UBS — the Swiss bank with $5.7 trillion in assets under management — announced that it was launching uMINT, or the UBS USD Investment Fund built on Ethereum. 

“Tokenholders can now access UBS Asset Management’s institutional grade cash management solutions underpinned by high quality money market instruments based on a conservative, risk-managed framework,” the press release said. So it’s unfortunately a bit unclear what financial instruments will make up the fund, whereas other popular funds right now hold US Treasurys. 

To give you some perspective: roughly $2.4 billion of total real-world asset value is US Treasury debt, with commodities coming in second at $1.1 billion, per RWA.xyz data. To be clear, the below chart isn’t including Treasurys held by stablecoin issuers such as Circle and Tether.

The co-head of UBS Asset Management APAC, Thomas Kaegi, acknowledged the “growing investor appetite” in the space. Right now, three firms: BlackRock through its Securitize partnership, Franklin Templeton and Ondo dominate the tokenized fund space. 

While BlackRock’s BUIDL and Franklin’s funds might be some of the most well-known, it’s actually Ondo that holds the biggest market cap at $655. Securitize is about $100 million shy, coming in at $533 million (which is BUIDL’s market cap). Franklin Templeton has a market cap of roughly $408 million.

UBS itself acknowledged that this launch is a sign that the firm is serious about the potential of tokenization, which isn’t a surprise given that it’s a participant in the Project Guardian initiative (the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s tokenization pilot) and has previously partnered to issue tokenized notes in China.

Outside of UBS, it’s worth noting that Securitize surpassed $1 billion in tokenized RWA onchain last week. As I noted above, the RWA platform has seen success through BlackRock’s tokenized fund. And Franklin Templeton launched its OnChain US Government Money Market Fund on Base. 

Tokenization may not be one of the sexiest crypto topics, but there certainly is a lot of movement happening in the space.

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