F/m Investments asked the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to allow it to tokenize shares of its flagship Treasury exchange-traded fund (ETF).
The $18 billion asset manager filed Wednesday for exemptive relief to let the F/m US Treasury 3 Month Bill ETF (TBIL) record ownership of its roughly $6 billion in shares on a permissioned blockchain, while remaining a standard 1940 Act exchange‑traded fund.
In its press release, F/m describes the filing as the “first of its kind” from an ETF issuer seeking US regulatory relief specifically for tokenized shares of a registered investment company.
The company said the onchain representation would use the same Committee on Uniform Securities Identification Procedures number, and carry the same rights, fees, voting power and economic terms as TBIL shares today, effectively making tokenization just another way to record who owns the shares, rather than a separate new asset.
A broader tokenization trend in traditional funds
F/m’s approach closely tracks recent experiments by Franklin Templeton, a major US asset manager that has launched blockchain‑enabled US government money market funds and other tokenization pilots, moving share ownership records for its onchain US government money market fund to a public blockchain while keeping the product under the Investment Company Act.
Related: State Street rolls out new crypto tokenization tools
In F/m’s case, tokenization would be layered onto a listed Treasury ETF rather than a money market mutual fund, potentially widening the universe of token‑enabled, regulated fixed‑income products.
The company contrasts its model with “stablecoins or unregistered digital tokens,” emphasizing that TBIL’s tokenized shares would still be subject to independent board oversight, daily portfolio transparency, third‑party custody and audit, and the broader protections of 1940 Act funds.
If the SEC grants the requested relief, F/m says TBIL would be able to support both traditional brokerage rails and digital-native, “token-aware” platforms through a single share class, without changing its investment objective or portfolio.
The application came just days after the New York Stock Exchange unveiled plans for a new venue aimed at 24/7 trading and onchain settlement of tokenized stocks and ETFs, as tokenization shifts from pilots to mainstream markets.
Cointelegraph reached out to F/m Investments for additional comment, but had not received a response by publication.
Magazine: Kevin O’Leary says quantum attacking Bitcoin would be a waste of time
