The Web3 Foundation, dedicated to the development of the Polkadot ecosystem, has announced an initial investment of $1 million in tokenized treasury bills.
In an X post on November 29, 2023, the Web3 Foundation revealed plans to place $1 million in tokenized US Treasury bills through Centrifuge, an institutional ecosystem for on-chain credit. With the investment, the foundation is said to become the first user of the real-world asset use case supported and managed across the chain to digitize assets with blockchain technology.
Web3 Foundation CEO Fabian Gompf said in a blog post that the tokenized asset industry has “huge potential and we are steadfast in our commitment to helping grow the industry and the Centrifuge protocol.” Gompf noted that the $1 million investment is just the beginning, adding that the foundation hopes to “grow rapidly beyond that.”
After the news broke, Polkadot’s native cryptocurrency DOT jumped 6% to $5.4, bringing its market capitalization to $7.1 billion, according to CoinGecko.
Apparently, the race for asset tokenization is just beginning, as the British Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) only at the end of November 2023 officially granted investment managers permission to develop tokenized funds based on a chain of blocks as the country seeks to benefit from the global digitalization trend. .
In early November 2023, British bank HSBC also announced its latest blockchain effort in partnership with Metaco, a Ripple-owned company, to serve institutional clients with demand for real-world assets hosted on a blockchain.
According to Boston Consulting Group, the total size of illiquid asset tokenization globally is expected to reach the $16 trillion mark by 2030, as “a large portion of the world’s wealth today is locked up in illiquid assets.” .
