A Swiss business called Backed Finance has launched blB01, a tokenized short-term US government bond ETF on Base, Coinbase’s layer-2 network, in an effort to transfer real-world assets onto the blockchain.
According to the business, this will be the first tokenized security offered on Base and will be issued in accordance with the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) Act of Switzerland.
According to the DLT Act, all tokens must be completely collateralized and transferrable across wallets, according to a press statement from Backed Finance that Blockworks examined.
According to Adam Levi, co-founder of Backed, an identical amount of the underlying asset is kept by third-party custodians for each token that is traded.
“In the case of bIB01, the underlying asset is the iShares Treasury Bond 0-1yr UCITS ETF (IB01), which tracks the investment results of an index composed of US Dollar denominated government bonds issued by the US Treasury, with remaining maturities between zero and one year,” stated Levi.
Levi continues by stating that Backed is unrelated to BlackRock and that its cryptocurrency is not an iShares product.
Tokenized assets may only be bought through Backed by qualified investors and authorized merchants that have undergone KYC verification and acquired anti-money laundering certifications from Backed.
Backed emphasizes that it has no plans to modify the fact that none of its financial assets are registered as US securities. This indicates that only those living outside of the United States will be allowed to purchase Backed’s tokens.
Nine tokenized products, including tokenized fixed income and equities, are presently available from the Backed team. The project presently has approximately $46 million in total value locked (TVL), according to statistics from DeFiLlama.
“We have noticed a lot of interest since our tokenization solution enables our clients to access these goods without having to directly deal with [conventional finance]. We want to introduce more on-chain depending on client demand. We are happy to tokenize any specified security if there is demand,” Levi remarked.
