F/m Investments is seeking the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s permission to become the first to tokenize shares of an exchange-traded fund.
The $18-billion ETF issuer said in a statement that it wants to tokenize and record ownership for one of its funds on a permissioned blockchain ledger. F/m Investments aims to tokenize its U.S. Treasury 3 Month Bill ETF (Nasdaq: TBIL).
F/m Investments said it believes this is the first time a firm has sought “SEC relief specifically for tokenized shares of a registered investment company.” CEO Alexander Morris added that the tokenization of traditional financial instruments is inevitable.
“If granted, the requested relief would allow TBIL’s existing ETF shares to be represented on a permissioned ledger under the same CUSIP, with the same rights, fees, voting rights, and economic terms as TBIL shares today,” the company said in its statement. “Unlike stablecoins or unregistered digital tokens—which generally cannot guarantee backing by traditional assets—F/m’s approach keeps tokenized shares firmly within the Investment Company Act of 1940.”
Additionally, F/m Investment promises “board oversight, daily transparency, third-party custody and audit.”
Tokenization debate
Lawmakers and regulators, along with Wall Street and crypto executives, have expressed interest in the tokenization of publicly traded shares. How the SEC should regulate the tokenization of securities, however, has yet to be decided.
This week, the New York Stock Exchange said it is developing a platform for trading and onchain settlement of tokenized U.S. equities and ETFs, pending regulatory approval.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and COO Rob Goldstein have compared tokenization’s potential impact to the rise of the early internet. “Ledgers haven’t been this exciting since the invention of double-entry bookkeeping,” they wrote last month.
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