Ripple to allocate $10M to tokenized US Treasury bills on XRP ledger

Payments network Ripple will allocate $10 million to a tokenized version of U.S. Treasury bills (T-bills) that will become available on the XRP Ledger for the first time.

The short-term U.S. government debt is being issued as TBILL tokens by the tokenization platform OpenEden, according to a Thursday release.

Assets backing the tokens will be invested in short-dated U.S. Treasuries and reverse repurchase agreements (repos) collateralized by U.S. Treasuries. Repos are securities sold with an agreement to repurchase them at a higher price at a specified future date.

The tokenization of tangible real-world assets and traditional financial securities is a growing sector of the crypto industry. It allows traditional assets, especially private and alternative assets, to be issued, managed, and distributed in a way that is considered more efficient than their off-chain counterparts.

There are big players involved. In March, BlackRock, the world’s largest fund manager by assets under management, released its USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund on the Ethereum blockchain, backing it with U.S. Treasury bills, repo agreements and cash.

Ripple's allocation is part of a larger fund the company will allocate to tokenized T-bills provided by OpenEden and other unspecified issuers. Neither OpenEden nor Ripple Labs specified dates for the fund's allocation in the release.

XRP Ledger (XRPL) is an open-source blockchain that uses the cryptocurrency XRP to facilitate global financial transfers and currency exchanges.

As of Thursday, there are over $780 million worth of funds locked in tokenized versions of U.S. treasuries, as per tracking site rwa.xyz.