Report: Coinbase Asset Management Creating Tokenized Money Market Fund

Coinbase Asset Management is reportedly creating a tokenized money market fund.

The company, which is an arm of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, is working on the project with Bermuda-based Apex Group, CoinDesk reported Wednesday (July 24).

This effort follows another move in the tokenization space by Coinbase Asset Management, according to the report. The company received in-principle approval from an Abu Dhabi regulator in December 2023 to tokenize traditional assets on its ethereum scaling network called Base.

It also comes after asset manager BlackRock introduced a tokenization of real-world assets: a fund called BUIDL that holds U.S. Treasurys and gained $500 million of assets following its launch in March, per the report.

Tokenization of real-world assets has become a big trend in crypto, the report said.

It was reported in May that Coinbase has been diversifying its revenue sources and generated about a third of its sales in the first quarter from sources other than trading fees.

These sources include revenue share on USDC stablecoin and revenue from its Base blockchain. Coinbase also serves as the custodian for most U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs and is listed as a custodian for spot ether ETFs that are expected to be OKed by regulators.

In another move in the tokenization space, Ripple and Archax said in June that they extended their existing collaboration in an effort to bring hundreds of millions of dollars of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) onto the XRP Ledger (XRPL) over the coming year.

“We have hit the tipping point for mainstream adoption of digital assets for real-world use cases,” Graham Rodford, CEO at Archax, said in a press release. “There is clear real-world utility in use cases like RWA tokenization for the operational efficiency, access to liquid markets and transparency inherent to crypto, and Archax has already tokenized assets such as equities, debt instruments and money market funds.”

The tokenization of real-world assets is a function of the blockchain landscape that has captured the imagination of various players across payments, finance and commerce, PYMNTS reported in April.

Tokenized RWAs have the potential to make assets more liquid, accessible and efficient while enhancing transparency, security and global reach.