Real-World Asset Firm Superstate Launches First Fund Tokenizing U.S. Treasuries

Superstate, an asset manager which makes tokenized investment products, launched its first fund today.

The fund, called USBT, will invest in short-term U.S. Treasuries and charge a management fee of 15 basis points, according to a release shared with The Defiant.

Only Qualified Purchasers, a designation granted by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which is typically reserved for entities with a net worth exceeding $5 million, will be eligible to acquire USBT.

Investors will be able to self-custody their USBT at an address of their choice. They will also have the freedom to use different security implementations like multisignature wallets or multi-party computation (MPC), or traditional externally owned accounts (EOAs) to secure the assets.

Anchorage Digital, a federally chartered bank, will also be an option for custody.

USBT will enter a crowded market for tokenized treasuries — an array of projects have already tokenized $862 million of U.S. Treasuries, according to a dashboard from rwa.xyz.

Superstate however, contends that its approach is unique.

“USTB is a fund that directly holds government securities, rather than wrapping ETFs or another product (which introduces multiple layers of fees),” a spokesperson from Superstate told The Defiant in an email. “In essence, it’s a proof-of-concept of the tokenization technologies that Superstate is building.”

Projects like Ondo Finance, burst onto the scene last year with these wrapped ETF offerings which have since attracted over $126 million for the project, according to RWA.xyz.

Superstate is taking a slightly different approach in that USTB doesn’t represent any pre-existing security, but is a fund which is native to the Ethereum blockchain.

The product’s launch is part of Superstate’s efforts to “modern[ize] the infrastructure of investment funds,” as its website says.

When the Defiant asked Superstate to expand on its mission a spokesperson said “moderning investment funds refers to our vision of bringing this tokenization methodology to asset classes, types of investors, and geographies over time, at scale.”

Robert Leshner, Superstate’s CEO, also founded the lending platform Compound Finance, which is one of DeFi’s oldest projects and holds $2.1 billion in total value locked (TVL).

Superstate raised $14M in a funding round co-led by venture firms Distributed Global and CoinFund in November.