F/m Investments has asked the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to allow the tokenization of shares of its flagship treasury fund (ETF).
$18 billion asset manager filed on Wednesday to obtain an exemption allowing the F/m US Treasury 3 Month Bill ETF (TBIL) to register ownership of approximately $6 billion in stocks on a permitted blockchain while remaining a standard 1940 exchange-traded fund.
In its press release, F/m describes a “first-of-its-kind” filing by an ETF issuer seeking U.S. regulatory relief, specifically for tokenized shares of a registered investment company.
The company said the onchain representation will exploit the same Committee for Uniform Securities Identification Procedures number and will carry the same rights, fees, voting power and economic terms as today’s TBIL shares, in effect making tokenization just another way of recording share ownership rather than a separate novel asset.
A broader trend of tokenization in established funds
F/m’s approach closely mirrors recent experiments by Franklin Templeton, a major U.S. asset manager that has launched blockchain-enabled government money market funds and other tokenization pilots, moving the share ownership records of its U.S. government money market fund onchain to a public blockchain while maintaining the product under the Investment Company Act.
Related: State Street introduces novel cryptocurrency tokenization tools
In the case of F/m, tokenization would be imposed on an exchange-traded Treasury ETF rather than a money market mutual fund, potentially expanding the scope of regulated fixed-income products that support tokens.
The company contrasts its model with “stable coins or unregistered digital tokens,” emphasizing that tokenized TBIL shares will still be subject to independent board oversight, daily portfolio transparency, third-party oversight and audit, and broader fund protections under the 1940 Act.
If the SEC grants the requested relief, F/m claims that TBIL will be able to operate both established brokerage platforms and native “token-aware” digital platforms through a single class of shares, without changing its investment objective or portfolio.
The filing came just days after the New York Stock Exchange revealed plans for a novel venue aimed at 24/7 onchain trading and settlement of tokenized stocks and ETFs as tokenization moves from pilot to mainstream markets.
Cointelegraph reached out to F/m Investments for additional comment but did not receive a response via publication.
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