Aviva Investors has introduced a tokenized share class of its £22 billion Sterling Liquidity Fund on the XRP Ledger in a launch carried out with Ripple. The asset manager said it seeded the new share class with £50 million, or about $66.7 million.
The move lifts total investment across Aviva’s two tokenized money market fund offerings to more than £86 million, roughly $114.8 million. The new offering applies tokenization to an existing Ireland-domiciled UCITS fund while keeping the underlying assets and fund operations offchain.
A tokenized version of an established fund
The Sterling Liquidity Fund dates back to 2002 and invests in high-grade, sterling-denominated short-term debt instruments. Aviva said the fund offers daily liquidity and continues to operate in its existing structure even as a new onchain share class is added.
Aviva described the setup as a “digital twin” model. Under that approach, investor holdings are represented onchain, but the fund itself remains offchain rather than being fully moved onto blockchain infrastructure.
How the structure is set up
The new share class is available through the XRP Ledger, and investors need an eligible digital wallet to access it. BNY Mellon serves as the holder of the fund’s assets, while digital asset custodian Komainu and digital infrastructure platform Licuido also supported the launch.
According to Aviva, the tokenized shares are intended to match the conventional version of the fund in key respects. The firm said they have the same investment objective, risk profile, liquidity characteristics and regulatory protections as the standard share class.
Second tokenized fund on XRPL for Aviva
This is Aviva Investors’ second tokenized money market fund offering on the XRP Ledger. The company first announced a partnership with Ripple in February, when it said it planned to bring some of its traditional investment funds onto the network.
Ripple said at that time that Aviva was its first European investment management partner. Aviva later launched a tokenized share class of its USD Liquidity Fund on the XRP Ledger on July 29, after receiving approval from the Central Bank of Ireland.
What comes next
The launch extends Aviva’s use of tokenization from a dollar-denominated liquidity product to a sterling one, using the same broader model of representing investor holdings onchain while the underlying fund remains in the conventional system.
The next confirmed milestone is the availability of the new share class to investors that meet the wallet access requirement. Beyond that, the source article does not outline further launches or changes to the fund’s strategy.
Source: www.theblock.co