According to Celisa Morin, who formerly served as the Vice President of Platform Distribution at Grayscale, traditional financial institutions are showing a growing interest in tokenizing assets that are stored on public blockchains.
Morin, who is currently in charge of the cryptocurrency section at Reed Smith, is of the opinion that a new narrative in the traditional finance (TradFi) industry that is being led by BlackRock could encourage more companies to tokenize assets on public chains rather than private ones.
The recent launch of BlackRock's $100 million tokenized 'BUIDL' fund on the Ethereum network is cited by Morin as a significant breakthrough in the industry.
Despite the fact that there may be potential legal problems and controversies regarding public wallets, the fund, which now has assets of $288 million, was founded on a public blockchain.
Morin also draws attention to the forward-thinking decision made by Franklin Templeton to conduct the launch of its tokenized money market fund on the Ethereum layer-2 network Polygon in the month of October 2023.
An amount of $360.2 million worth of United States Treasuries has already been tokenized by the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX), which has contributed to a total of $1.08 billion worth of tokenized United States Treasuries across 17 different products.
Morin, on the other hand, is skeptical about the approval of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that are based on spot Ether expected to take place in May. Morin agrees that the chances of approval before VanEck's deadline on May 23rd decrease with each day that the SEC refrains from engaging in public comment.
He cites the lack of communication that exists between the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and prospective fund issuers as the reason for this.
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