First Mover Americas: Tokenized Treasury Notes Surpass $1B

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The market for tokenized U.S. Treasury debt is booming. The market value of Treasury notes tokenized through public blockchains like Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, Stellar and others has crossed above $1 billion for the first time, data tracked by Tom Wan, an analyst at crypto firm 21.co, show. Tokenized Treasuries are digital representations of U.S. government bonds that can be traded as tokens on the blockchain. The market value has risen nearly 10-fold since January last year and 18% since traditional finance giant BlackRock announced Etheruem-based tokenized fund BUIDL on March 20.

Bitcoin (BTC) prices were little changed over the past 24 hours after a volatile week. Prices briefly jumped above $71,000 on Tuesday, and have since retreated slightly to levels around $70,700 ahead of a major options expiry on Friday. Most major tokens posted slight losses. Meanwhile, bitcoin cash (BCH) zoomed 13% before an expected halving event on April 4. The current block reward of 6.25 BCH will be cut to 3.125 BCH. Open interest on BCH-tracked futures more than doubled to $500 million on Thursday from $213 million last week, showing an increase in levered bets on more expected price volatility.

BlackRock's first tokenized asset fund is off to a strong start, garnering a significant market share of the blockchain-based tokenized U.S. Treasury market just a week after its debut. Blockchain data shows that BlackRock's BUIDL raked in $245 million of deposits as of Wednesday. Its strong introduction propelled the fund into second place among peers, trailing only Franklin Templeton's Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX), which has $360 million of deposits, according to rwa.xyz data.