Aviva Investors, the asset management arm of UK insurer Aviva, has launched a tokenized share class of its Sterling Liquidity Fund on the XRP Ledger. It is the company's largest fund, with about 22 billion pounds ($29.4 billion) under management. Aviva and Ripple announced the launch in a joint statement on Monday.
What exactly did Aviva launch?
No new fund was created. Aviva added one more share class to an existing money fund that invests in short-term sterling instruments. The portfolio is the same. What changed is the form in which an investor holds a stake. Instead of a registry entry, it is a token on the XRP Ledger (XRPL), a network that runs alongside the XRP asset.
This is Aviva's second step of the kind. In July the company put a tokenized class of its USD Liquidity Fund on XRPL. The two tokenized classes now hold about 86 million pounds, and 50 million of that is Aviva's own investment in the new sterling class.
The company describes itself as one of Europe's largest providers of tokenized money market funds.
How does it work step by step?
A tokenized money market fund is simpler than it sounds. The general scheme looks like this.
- The share becomes a token: the right to a stake in the fund is recorded as a digital entry on a blockchain.
- The fund itself runs as before, with the same management and rules.
- Buying, transferring and redeeming happen on the network, not only through a traditional registry.
- Access is usually limited to investors who have passed checks.
The main promise of this model is faster settlement and round-the-clock record keeping. Whether it delivers will depend on how much money investors bring.
Why XRPL?
Ripple calls the launch part of a wider collaboration: both companies want to bring more tokenized funds to XRPL. The network ranks ninth among blockchains for tokenized real-world assets. According to RWA.xyz, $642 million in value is distributed there, with about 2,900 unique holders.
How big a step is this?
Measured against the fund itself, a modest one. 86 million pounds in tokens is less than 0.4% of what the Sterling Liquidity Fund alone holds. Aviva is just getting started.
The tokenized stock market behaves differently. According to Cointelegraph, the onchain market cap of Securitize's SECZ token fell to $208.6 million, while Circle-linked tokens reached a combined $383.6 million across several issuers. The whole segment is valued at $3.3 billion. Money market funds grow more cautiously, but large asset managers stand behind them.
What does a regular user get out of it?
Almost nothing directly. The announcement says nothing about access for retail investors. Still, the direction is clear. Tokenized funds are becoming one more place to keep money on a blockchain, next to stablecoins such as USDT. A fund pays money market yield, while a stablecoin on its own does not.
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