Archax, the first FCA regulated digital asset exchange, broker and custodian, announced that it is expanding the range of fund shares it offers in tokenised form with the provision of the BlackRock ICS US Treasury money market fund1 (MMF), in partnership with the HBAR Foundation. This builds on its launch of tokenised access to abrdn’s MMFs last year, which Archax has created on both the Hedera and Ethereum blockchains.

This additional BlackRock MMF, along with existing offerings, are all available directly on the Archax platform, as well as through connected networks. The first transaction of tokenised shares of the BlackRock MMF, which was also tokenised on Hedera, the open-source, proof-of-stake public ledger, was completed across the Ownera FinP2P digital asset network.

In the current high interest-rate environment, putting cash, treasury and stablecoin assets to work is more important than ever. MMFs are a useful vehicle as they have the potential to provide institutional stability and yield, due to their underlying investments in short-term debt products, and reduce single bank or stablecoin provider counterparty risk. In addition, through creating a secondary market for the tokenised instruments, Archax can provide investors with the benefit of almost instantaneous transfer of MMF shares throughout the day – an advantage which can also see the tokens being used for collateral movement instead of just traditional subscriptions/redemptions.

Graham Rodford, CEO and co-founder of Archax, comments: “Money market funds from different asset managers can follow different underlying investment theses – for example investing in short-term governmental debt issuances or commercial short-term debt issuances. Consequently, it is important to have a range of offerings available to cater to differing client needs. Adding more funds into our portfolio of tokenised shares of MMF offerings expands the flavours we have on offer and so allows us to serve a broader range of potential clients.”

“As well as MMF product breadth, product distribution is also vitally important”, continues Rodford. “And so we are pleased to be expanding our partnership with Ownera to further leverage their FinP2P network for distribution of tokenised shares in MMFs and to help facilitate our first $multi-million trade on Hedera too.”

Ami Ben David, CEO and co-founder of Ownera, adds: “Using a simple Ownera Buy-Side Router, suitable banks of all sizes, wealth managers, asset managers, broker-dealers, RIAs (registered investment advisors), and exchanges can route transactions to the tokenized MMFs offered by Archax. This is another step towards realising the vision we share with Archax and other partners across the ecosystem, of a global institutional tokenized assets ecosystem with market-wide access, distribution and liquidity.”

With all the excitement in the marketplace around real-world-asset (RWA) tokenisation, funds are certainly front and centre as a use case. MMFs are particularly prominent too, as these provide benefits to and serve both the Traditional Finance (TradFi) tokenised world as well as the pure crypto space.

Shayne Higdon, CEO of The HBAR Foundation, comments: “The addition of MMF shares tokenised on Hedera, enabled by Archax, is a huge vote of confidence. Hedera’s unmatched speed, security, and low-cost infrastructure is ideally suited for the institutional-grade tokenisation of real-world assets made possible by Archax.”

Source: Archax