Lưu trữ cho từ khóa: tokenization

Altcoin

Visa to pilot tokenized asset platform for banks on Ethereum

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Visa to pilot tokenized asset platform for banks on Ethereum

Visa to develop a platform for banks to test fiat-backed blockchain tokens

Visa has announced the launch of the Visa Tokenized Asset Platform, aiming to help banks and financial institutions explore the use of tokenized assets on blockchains, according to Blockworks. 

Tokenization is a process that converts real-world assets, such as money, into digital tokens that can be used on blockchain networks. 

This technology could allow banks to issue fiat-backed tokens, representing traditional money, on blockchain systems, enabling them to engage in digital financial markets.

Visa on the Ethereum blockchain

Visa’s VTAP will allow banks to test and experiment with how these tokens can be used, offering a way to make transactions faster and more efficient.

The company plans to conduct its first pilot on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain in 2025, working with a select group of customers, per Blockworks. 

Ethereum is one of the most popular blockchain networks and supports smart contracts—self-executing programs that handle transactions when certain conditions are met.

This move aligns with Visa’s past work in the digital currency space, as it has previously collaborated with HSBC and Hang Seng Bank on similar projects in Hong Kong. The pilot highlighted enhanced privacy and security in transactions and showcased potential tokenized assets and programmable finance applications.

Visa has been active in the token economy and stablecoin space, earlier in September Ether.fi launched a Visa-enabled credit card and wallet app, allowing users to access fiat credit using crypto as collateral. 

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Theo Crypto News

DeFi

MANTRA announces mainnet launch set for October

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Real-world assets platform MANTRA has announced that the mainnet launch for its MANTRA Chain will go live in October 2024.

MANTRA (OM), a layer-1 blockchain for RWA tokenization, said in a Sept. 18 announcement that the mainnet launch will offer key features such as enhanced network stability and institutional-grade access to on-chain finance and tokenized assets.

Bridging DeFi and TradFi

The mainnet will position the blockchain platform to achieve its goal of bringing traditional finance on-chain, MANTRA co-founder and chief executive officer John Patrick Mullin said.

MANTRA’s token and stablecoin on-ramps continue to attract more businesses and industry players to the RWA and asset tokenization space, helping to bridge the gap between decentralized finance and traditional finance, Mullin added.

MANTRA has struck some key partnerships

The MANTRA Chain’s mainnet launch will support this objective through new partnerships in the real-world assets ecosystem. Mantra unveiled its incentivized testnet in April and struck a signficant partnership with MAG, a UAE-based real estate giant. The deal centers around the tokenization of $500 million in real estate.

In August, MANTRA disclosed a memorandum of understanding between the blockchain firm and an aviation finance company. The collaboration aims to unlock RWA investment opportunities in the aviation sector, a market currently valued at over $200 billion.

These developments have recently catalyzed the native token OM’s performance, with prices surging amid a spike in active wallets and staking.

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Công nghệ

WisdomTree launches platform for real-world tokenized assets

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WisdomTree has introduced a new platform called WisdomTree Connect to give users access to tokenized real-world assets. 

The platform aims to make tokenized assets more accessible to businesses and institutional users, allowing them to integrate traditional financial products with DeFi systems, according to a press release from WisdomTree.

Tokenization refers to the process of turning traditional assets, like money market funds, into digital tokens that can be used on blockchain networks.

The new platform enables users to buy and hold WisdomTree digital funds in their own digital wallets, which can either be self-hosted or managed by a third party. For businesses and financial institutions, the platform provides a way to streamline transactions that would normally require multiple steps, such as converting crypto into traditional fiat money to buy financial products. 

WisdomTree Connect will address this by allowing firms to purchase yield-generating products directly using blockchain technology, eliminating several steps.

For instance, businesses using stablecoins — crypto designed to maintain a stable value—will be able to buy products like the WisdomTree Government Money Market Digital Fund without needing to leave the blockchain ecosystem.

In July, Jonathan Steinberg, CEO of WisdomTree, expressed confidence that cryptocurrency adoption would accelerate with increased regulatory clarity. He also predicted that crypto would become mainstream as an asset class amid trends such as tokenization.

WisdomTree Connect availability 

WisdomTree Connect will initially be available through a web portal and API, according to the release, with plans to expand how users interact with the platform. The platform will support transactions in U.S. dollars and the USDC (USDC) stablecoin, which is pegged to the U.S. dollar. This feature adds flexibility for users who need to convert between fiat currency and crypto.

Tokens on the platform will initially be minted on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain, with additional blockchains to be supported later. WisdomTree’s new infrastructure is designed to offer businesses and institutions a secure, on-chain way to access traditional financial products, bridging the gap between decentralized and traditional finance.

In March, WisdomTree received approval from the NYDFS to operate as a limited liability trust company, allowing it to offer crypto services such as stablecoin issuance and reserves management. 

The firm also launched its WisdomTree Prime app and continues its efforts to advance tokenized asset management and a spot Bitcoin ETF after previous rejections by the SEC.

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DeFi

Centrifuge and Anemoy partner with Archax to list liquid treasury token

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Anemoy, a tokenized securities issuer powered by on-chain finance platform Centrifuge, has partnered with Archax to bring their Liquid Treasury Fund to the platform.

Centrifuge, Anemoy and Archax are partnering to expand access to new investment opportunities in the tokenized real-world assets market.

Per a press release shared with crypto.news, the partnership will allow London-based Archax to offer its users direct access to the U.S. Treasury bills via Anemoy’s liquid treasury fund.

Liquid funds relate to investments that one can easily liquidate for cash, and includes short-term treasury bills. 

The partnership looks to tap into Anemoy’s web3 infrastructure, Centrifuge’s growing traction in the real-world assets, and Archax’s distribution channels and venture capital.

With Archax handling sub-custodial services as well as compliance via know your customer, the move is intended to make it easier for institutional investors to gain exposure to T-bills, thereby expanding Archax users’ investment portfolio beyond USDC (USDC).

The strategic partnership with Archax, which is the first regulated digital assets exchange in the U.K., comes days after asset manager Janus Henderson announced its collaboration with Centrifuge and Anemoy.

On Sept. 13, Centrifuge revealed that Janus Henderson was taking over the management of Anemoy’s LTF, with the firms’ eyeing a market that is attracting major financial advisors and asset managers.

Nick Cherney, the head of innovation at Janus, said that the decentralized blockchain and the RWA market could be bigger and potentially more disruptive that the exchange-traded funds space.

According to Cherney, there’s possibility that these investments around decentralized blockchain will do to ETFs what the exchange-traded funds did to mutual funds.

Recent RWA.xyz data shows the global tokenized real-world assets market has grown to over $12 billion, with tokenized treasuries accounting for about $2.2 billion.

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Bitcoin

Coinbase launches cbBTC, a wrapped Bitcoin token

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Coinbase is rolling out cbBTC — Coinbase Wrapped BTC — an ERC20 token backed 1:1 by Bitcoin, which Coinbase holds.

According to a press release shared with crypto.news, the cbBTC token is now available on Base and Ethereum (ETH).

Wrapped Bitcoin is a tokenized version of Bitcoin (BTC) that runs on Ethereum or other blockchains, giving BTC holders access to DeFi applications. Coinbase’s cbBTC is the latest addition to the wrapped asset category, following the likes of WBTC (WBTC). 

In August, Coinbase posted a cryptic tweet about a new wrapped Bitcoin product. The news was announced on Coinbase’s official X account with a simple “cbBTC” followed by a “coming soon” comment.

Then, on Sept. 11, the Base X account tweeted a logo that was assumed to be the logo for the cbBTC. 

Details of cbBTC 

Coinbase users can now convert their Bitcoin to cbBTC when transferring from their accounts to Base or Ethereum addresses. This token can be used in popular DeFi protocols like Aave (AAVE), Compound (COMP), and MakerDAO, allowing users to lend, borrow, and earn yields with their Bitcoin.

CbBTC also ensures secure liquidity by being fully backed by Bitcoin held in Coinbase custody, which has a track record of over 10 years. This move aims to provide more utility for Bitcoin holders, allowing them to access decentralized finance applications using the Bitcoin they already own.

How cbBTC works

When sending BTC from Coinbase to an address on Base or Ethereum, it will be automatically converted 1:1 to cbBTC. When receiving cbBTC in the Coinbase account, it will be converted 1:1 from cbBTC to BTC.

CbBTC will not have a separate order book or trading pair on Coinbase. However, it will be available to trade on DEXs using Coinbase Wallet and may be listed on other third-party exchanges that choose to support it.

At launch, cbBTC send and receive will be available on Coinbase in the U.S. (excluding New York State), the UK, EEA states, Singapore, Australia, and Brazil. It will also be accessible globally on Base and Ethereum.

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Công nghệ

Huma secures $38m investment, eyes expansion to Solana and Stellar

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Huma Finance, a tokenized real-world assets platform, has raised $38 million in funding as it looks to scale its payment financing network.

According to an announcement on Sept. 11, Distributed Global led the platform’s equity round, with participation from Hashkey Capital, the Stellar Foundation, Folius Ventures, and Turkish private bank İşbank.

Huma plans to use the $10 million in equity financing and $28 million investment via yield-bearing RWAs to expand its PayFi network globally. In its blog post, Huma stated that it plans to go live on Solana (SOL) and Stellar (XLM)’s smart contracts network in coming months.

The platform will also launch the Huma Foundation later this year. Meanwhile, it is set to co-host its inaugural PayFi Summit at Singapore Token 20149 alongside the Solana Foundation and Stellar Development Foundation.

Huma Finance to hyper-scale its network

Huma Finance offers a payment financing platform that provides access to liquidity on the blockchain, allowing businesses and individuals to benefit from global money transfers, blockchain efficiency, and lower transaction costs.

Huma’s PayFi network aims to leverage the growing adoption of RWA, payments, and decentralized finance to bring the advantages of crypto and blockchain to the mainstream market. The company sees potential to carve out a portion of the $16 trillion credit card financing market for global merchants and the $10 trillion B2B market.

“PayFi is the creation of new financial markets around the time value of money. On-chain finance can enable new financial primitives, product experiences, and financial access that are impossible in traditional or even Web2 finance. When I met the Huma team, it was immediately apparent that they’d be a great anchor for the PayFi ecosystem within Solana.”

Lily Liu, President of Solana Foundation.

The real world assets market is seeing significant developments and adoption, with trends including the expansion of tokenization beyond real estate into sectors such as intellectual property and non-fungible tokens. It’s a growth trajectory likely to put NFTs off the ‘dead’ path, Huma recently noted.

Untapped opportunities in the market have driven institutional interest, as blockchain solutions bring transparency, efficiency, and accuracy to data in the RWA space.

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Altcoin

Can Ethereum provide a settlement layer for financial markets? | Opinion

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Public blockchains have a role to play in the future of financial markets, and Ethereum is well-positioned among public blockchains to act as a settlement layer. Understanding risk in the Ethereum ecosystem is vital to building robust applications for financial markets.

The benefits of blockchain and tokenization

For years, institutions have explored the use of blockchain and tokenization in financial markets. They aim to save time and money by streamlining settlement processes, using blockchain as a single source of truth among transaction participants, and reducing the need for cumbersome reconciliation efforts across participants’ records. 

Institutions also hope to make more asset types easier to use as collateral for transactions and to manage liquidity more efficiently by enabling intraday transactions. Holding assets as tokens on a blockchain should be an improvement over existing systems for most investors, and it should be possible to tokenize most financial assets. So, in the long run, shouldn’t all assets be tokenized?

Real use cases but small volumes

The key use cases so far in traditional financial markets are digital bonds (the issuance of a bond as a token on a blockchain) and tokenized Treasuries (or tokenized money market funds, shares in a fund holding US Treasuries). We have rated digital bonds across sovereign, local governments, banks, multilateral institutions, and corporates. 

We have also seen traditional financial incumbents setting up tokenized money market funds, such as Blackrock’s BUIDL fund. However, to date, the volumes of digital bonds and tokenized money market funds remain a tiny fraction of the volumes issued in traditional markets. What’s holding back adoption?

Challenges to adoption

Interoperability

The first key challenge is interoperability. Investors need to access the blockchains on which the tokenized assets are built, and institutions need to connect their legacy systems to those blockchains. To date, digital bond issuers have primarily used private permissioned blockchains, each of these being a “walled garden” set up by a specific institution. This does not support a liquid secondary market for these bonds to trade, hindering wider adoption. Different paths are emerging to address these challenges, including the use of:

  • Public blockchains. In recent months, we have seen the issuance of digital bonds on public blockchains, including Ethereum and Polygon. Blackrock also issued the BUIDL fund on Ethereum;
  • Private permissioned blockchains shared between a network of partner institutions;
  • Cross-chain communication technologies to allow different private and public chains to interact while mitigating security risks.

On-chain payments

The second key challenge is executing the cash leg of payments on-chain. Most digital bonds have used traditional payment systems rather than on-chain bond payments. This limits the benefits of issuing on-chain, weakening issuers’ incentive to issue and investors’ interest in buying digital bonds. In recent months, however, we have seen the first digital bonds from traditional issuers using on-chain payments in Switzerland, using a wholesale digital Swiss Franc issued by the Swiss National Bank specifically for this purpose. 

In jurisdictions where central bank digital currencies are further from crystalizing, privately issued stablecoins may similarly be tools that support the on-chain cash leg in financial market transactions. Emerging regulatory frameworks in key jurisdictions will enhance investors’ appetite to engage with stablecoins and the features they enable, boosting the adoption of on-chain payments.

Legal and regulatory considerations

Institutions remain cautious due to legal and regulatory questions, particularly with regard to their privacy, KYC/AML obligations, and whether it is possible to meet these obligations when using a public permissionless blockchain such as Ethereum. Technical innovations are emerging that address these challenges at different levels rather than the main Ethereum settlement layer. For example, zero-knowledge-proof technology can support privacy applications, whereas new token standards (such as ERC-3643 for Ethereum) enable transaction permissioning at the asset level.

Ethereum’s position in financial markets

Among public blockchains, Ethereum is well-positioned to gain adoption in a financial market context. It is where most of the liquidity in institutional-focused stablecoins currently resides. It benefits from relatively mature and battle-tested technology in its execution and consensus mechanisms, as well as its token standards and decentralized finance markets. 

Indeed, some of the main private blockchains used in financial markets have been developed to be compatible with Ethereum’s virtual machine. By converging around a common standard, institutions hope to keep pace with innovation and talent.

Managing Ethereum’s ecosystem risks

Ethereum’s success as a tool in financial markets will depend on institutions’ ability to understand and monitor Ethereum’s concentration risks, as well as the ecosystem’s ability to manage these risks. Ethereum requires the consensus of two-thirds of the network’s validators to finalize each new block added to the chain. If more than one-third of validators are offline at once, blocks cannot be finalized. It’s, therefore, crucial to monitor any concentration risk that could cause this to happen. In particular:

  • No single entity controls a third of validator nodes. The largest staking concentration (29%) is through the Lido decentralized staking protocol: these nodes share exposure to Lido’s smart contract risk but are operated by a multitude of different operators.
  • Diversification of client software packages run by validators (consensus and execution clients) mitigates the risk of a network outage resulting from any bug in this software. This is a strength over most public blockchains, which currently each use a single client. Client concentration risk persists, however, as seen in the network’s only delayed finality event in May 2023.
  • Validators are not concentrated through a single cloud provider: the largest exposure hosted by a single provider is only 16% of validators.

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NFT

Celo Foundation and Celosphere launch new music NFT collection

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Celia Inside has launched a new music NFT collection on Celosphere, marking a significant moment for the platform. 

The launch and collection include 1,000 NFTs, priced at 3 CELO (CELO) each, 500 of which feature the original track and 500 of which showcase a remix. 

These NFTs are among the first music NFTs available on Celosphere, making this launch notable in the platform’s history.

Music NFTs, digital tokens representing ownership of a specific track or album, are gaining traction in the web3 space. They offer artists new ways to engage with fans and monetize their work directly.

These NFTs can represent anything from a single track to an entire album, offering exclusive ownership or access rights to the buyer.

This release comes as the NFT market experienced a 23.4% jump in sales between Aug. 19 and 24 to settle at just under $100 million in total sales. The uptick in activity was accompanied by a nearly 43% increase in NFT buyers, totaling 468,822, and a 41% rise in sellers, reaching 223,433.

NFT traders are showing a growing interest in blue-chip collections and emerging projects.

Details of the NFT drop

The drop, titled “iridescent wave: remix party,” features two versions of the track “Show You How.” The original song, an upbeat dance anthem, is paired with a remix by Venezuelan-American drag performer saltï, who won a remix contest organized in June during Pride Month.

Celia Inside is a web3 artist-producer active since 2021 and was selected as a finalist for the Celo Creators Fund by Boys Club. Her blog, “iridescent wave,” highlights women and QPOC artists in the web3 scene. 

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Công nghệ

Franklin Templeton brings tokenized money market fund to Avalanche

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Franklin Templeton, a global investment firm managing over $1.6 trillion in assets, has expanded its tokenized money market fund to Avalanche.

Franklin Templeton announced on Aug. 22 that its OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund had extended to the Avalanche (AVAX) blockchain to meet growing investor demand.

This expansion follows Franklin Templeton’s recent launch its FOBXX fund on Ethereum (ETH) layer-2 network Arbitrum (ARB). FOBXX is also available on Stellar (XLM) as well as Polygon (MATIC).

“I’m thrilled to see the Avalanche platform supporting the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund. Franklin Templeton shares a mutual commitment to developing transformative digital financial products and services that will meet on-chain investor demand today and bring off-chain capital and users into the ecosystem tomorrow.”

John Wu, President of Ava Labs.

Investing in FOBXX

Franklin Templeton launched the money market fund in 2021, allowing investors to earn yield from U.S. treasuries. The firm uses its BENJI token to represent a single share of FOBXX, which investors can purchase using the USDC (USDC) stablecoin through their Benji wallets. Holders can also transfer their fund shares peer-to-peer on-chain.

Roger Bayston, head of digital assets at Franklin Templeton noted that bringing the Benji platforms to Avalanche “further expands access to our first-of-its-kind tokenized money market fund.”

The tokenized treasuries market

The tokenized U.S treasuries market is on an upward trajectory, with data from real-world assets platform rwa.xyz putting the total value of tokenized treasuries at over $1.92 billion as of Aug. 22.

FOBXX has a market cap of over $424 million, behind the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, or BUIDL, which currently leads with over $502 million.

In terms of blockchain networks, Ethereum holds the vast majority of the market value at over $1.3 billion, while Stellar, Solana, and Mantle follow with $434 million, $48 million, and $30 million, respectively.

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