VanEck Launches RWA Tokenized Fund That Offers Exposure to US Treasury Bills

Investment firm VanEck has launched a tokenized real-world asset (RWA) fund offering exposure to US Treasury bills in partnership with tokenization platform Securitize.

The initiative, announced on May 13, places VanEck among a growing number of traditional finance firms entering the RWA tokenization space. The firm said the fund, called VBILL, will be initially available on Avalanche, BNB Chain, Ethereum and Solana blockchains.

The fund’s minimum subscriptions start at $100,000 for investments running on Avalanche, BNB Chain, and Solana, while the minimum subscription on Ethereum is $1 million.

The new offering comes as traditional financial firms have been increasingly launching RWA tokenized funds. In January, Apollo, an investment firm with $751 billion in assets under management, launched a private credit tokenized fund. Other competitors in the space include BlackRock and Franklin Templeton.

As of May 13, the total market capitalization of US Treasurys is $6.9 billion, making it the second-largest asset class in tokenized funds after private credit, according to data from RWA.xyz.

The DEFI firm’s partnership with Securitize comes as the tokenization platform has tokenized over $3.9 billion in assets and raised $47 million in a strategic funding round led by BlackRock.

Tokenization of real-world assets has many benefits that outpace traditional finance systems, such as faster settlement times and liquidity to previously illiquid assets, according to supporters of the technology.

SEC Chair Atkins on RWA tokenization

At the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) recent roundtable on May 12, Chair Paul Atkins compared the moving of securities onchain to the transition of songs from analog to digital.

“Just as the shift to digital audio revolutionized the music industry, the migration to onchain securities has the potential to remodel aspects of the securities market by enabling entirely new methods of issuing, trading, owning, and using securities,” Atkins said.

“Blockchain technology holds the promise to allow for a broad swath of novel use cases for securities, fostering new kinds of market activities that many of the Commission’s legacy rules and regulations do not contemplate today,” he added.