Treasuries on the chain: Wall Street tests tokenization with a T-Bill ETF

One of Wall Street’s safest and most tightly regulated assets is inching onto the blockchain, as an ETF issuer seeks approval to tokenize part of the U.S. Treasury market without changing how investors trade or hold the fund.

Summary

• This is not just a one-off experiment with TBIL. The push to bring traditional financial assets onto blockchains — often called tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs) — has gained significant momentum in the past year.
• Major firms and banks are launching tokenized products.
• BlackRock’s digital liquidity fund has scaled quickly on Ethereum, and JPMorgan recently launched a tokenized money-market fund for institutional investors.

F/m Investments, which runs the $6.3 billion US Treasury 3-Month Bill ETF (TBIL), has asked the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for permission to record some existing ETF shares on a blockchain.

The firm filed for permission on Jan. 21.

The proposal would leave the fund’s holdings, ticker and trading unchanged, while allowing tokenized and conventional shares to coexist with identical fees, rights and disclosures.

If approved, the move would position short-term treasuries as a real-world test case for bringing blockchain-based ownership records into the heart of regulated securities markets—on regulators’ terms rather than outside them.

This is not just a one-off experiment with TBIL. The push to bring traditional financial assets onto blockchains — often called tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs) — has gained significant momentum in the past year.

Major firms and banks are launching tokenized products.

BlackRock’s digital liquidity fund, for example, has scaled quickly on Ethereum, and JPMorgan recently launched a tokenized money-market fund for institutional investors.