$1B in Tokenized T-Bills - Big Milestones Abound 🚀

Well, that didn’t take long! Tokenized Treasuries have soared past the $1 billion mark. 💹

Another week, another record set in the world of tokenized real-world assets. This week has less blockbuster news than the previous couple of issues, but the details are just as important! 🤓

🎯🔥 Rapid Fire Takeaways:

💸 Over $1B in U.S. Treasury Notes Has Been Tokenized on Public Blockchains

🤝 Crypto Hiring: McKinsey exec joins Ondo Finance

💎 Plume Network Partners With Coinbase Wallet

📜 Hokkoku Bank launches Japan’s first deposit-backed stablecoin

🤷 Philadelphia Fed’s CBDC survey reveals surprising insights on privacy issues

🌐 Seven central banks in BIS Project Agora to tokenize cross-border payments

TradFi talent taken by tokenization – we love to see it! After all, we need the brightest minds to build the future of global financial services. 🤖

🤝 New Talent and Partnerships 

Remember a few weeks ago when Benjamin Duve, the Head of Tokenization for BNY Mellon, parted ways with the bank to head up the European Central Bank as Lead Market Infrastructure Expert? 👀

He’s not alone. McKinsey’s head of digital assets, Ian De Bode, is departing the company for a role at US Treasury tokenizer Ondo Finance. 👏

Benjamin and Ian are powerhouses in their own right, but it takes more than a village to tokenize the world. Prepare to see a lot more world-class talent migrate from the traditional financial scenes and into the realms of policymaking and tokenization strategy. 💡

Plume, the premier EVM-compatible layer 2 for tokenized real-world assets, has a really good strategy of its own. It includes some talented builders, collaboration via their flight program, and now a partnership with Coinbase Wallet. 👛

The Plume team has been working incredibly hard to build a dedicated layer 2 network for tokenizing real-world assets, and it shows. This latest partnership with Coinbase Wallet is just the latest sprinkle of magic to the Plume ecosystem.

💵 T-Bills, Big Thrills

It’s official: Blackrock’s BUIDL fund was enough to bring the total value of tokenized Treasury assets to above $1 billion in value for the first time. This milestone represents a significant psychological hurdle for the industry. 👏

While the jump from $750 million to $950 million was technically larger, there’s something about tacking on another zero that feels so right. Only $9 billion to go until we get to do it again… someone call Larry Fink. 🗣️📲

Meanwhile, GK8, a custody agent owned by Galaxy Digital, has unveiled its Tokenization Wizard, which enables the creation of self-custodied and compliant tokenized real-world assets without the technical hassle of manual deployment. That’s the tokenization magic we’ll need to court the next few billion in assets on-chain. 🧙

🏛️ Banks Get Busy 

Most of us don’t have a few billion lying around. But if you do, you might use it to launch a stablecoin. That’s exactly what Hokkoku Bank is doing: launching a deposit-backed stablecoin, the first of its kind in Japan. 🥇

Creating a yen-backed stablecoin sounds like a good way to introduce tokenization to Japan. Recall a recent Japanese survey where only 3.1% knew the term CBDC. Despite having a life-sized Gundam, Japan seems slightly behind the curve in terms of asset tokenization so far. 💴

Across (a few) ponds, Lloyds Bank, along with Nationwide and RightMove, have together closed the $12.6 million round of English DLT startup Coadjute. Focused on real estate tokenization, Coadjute aims to expedite the lag time between accepting an offer and completing a sale, which can often take months. Let’s see if blockchain cuts that down to days instead of months. 🏠

Patex, the largest blockchain ecosystem in Latin America, has secured a strategic partnership with Brazilian investment firm Acura Capital with the goal of launching a digital banking platform. With 670 million people, 70% of which are unbanked, tokenization has massive untapped potential in Latin America. 🌎

🕴️ Central Bank and Regulator Redux 

Every piece of the CBDC puzzle counts if you want to see the full picture. 🧩

That’s why our ears perked up when we heard about the Bank of International Settlements' Project Agora initiative, which sees seven central banks working together on a DLT-based tool for interbank settlement. That’s a serious collaboration that sounds close to the final stages of a blockchain use case at one of the world’s banks for banks. 👂

Perhaps most surprisingly… average people don’t seem to mind. A recent survey by the Philadephia Federal Reserve found that privacy ranked surprisingly low in terms of concerns, with 42% of survey respondents expressing worry. Surprisingly, 52% were open to the idea of a CBDC, with the caveat that it was low- or no-fee and was widely accepted. 💵

While the argument over whether the United States will ever see a CBDC continues, builders in the jurisdiction received an encouraging rallying cry from Hester Pierce of the SEC. She took SAB121 to task, declaring that barring US banks from custodying digital assets arguably does not protect investors. 🛡️

We’ve been vocal proponents of repealing SAB121 since a congressional oversight committee concluded that it required Congressional approval from the start. With any luck, Gary’s chair becomes Hester’s at some point, and we can start having more honest and direct conversations about what policies are needed to balance innovation and consumer protections. 🤞

Other jurisdictions remain unfettered. Singapore’s Monetary Authority (MAS) recently released guidance on digital asset custody, stating that segregated accounts are required but can remain under the same custodian. That’s a stark contrast between uncertainty and confusion and a targeted, tech-forward policy. 💽

💦 Wild Week Wind Down 

Wait, didn’t we say this week had less blockbuster news!? Looks like things are accelerating when you read between the lines. 🔍

Speaking of which, we’re doing weekly diagnoses of the RWA landscape in our RWA 101 series with Wolf Web3 – we had our first discussion on tokenized real estate yesterday. 🐺

Join us every Thursday at 2 pm EDT on X to learn more from the builders who are defining how asset tokenization is taking shape. 🧱