Wall Street’s cautious blockchain experiment
F/m Investments, the company behind the $6.3 billion US Treasury 3-Month Bill ETF (TBIL), has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for permission to put some of its ETF shares on a blockchain. The filing happened on January 21, and if approved, it would mark a significant moment—traditional finance testing blockchain technology within existing regulatory frameworks.
What’s interesting here is the approach. They’re not creating a new product or changing how investors trade. The fund’s holdings, ticker symbol, and trading mechanics would stay exactly the same. Tokenized shares would simply coexist alongside conventional ones, with identical fees, rights, and disclosures. It’s a quiet, almost invisible integration of blockchain into something that’s about as mainstream as you can get: short-term U.S. Treasury bills.
Why this matters
Alexander Morris, the CEO of F/m Investments, put it bluntly: “Tokenization is coming to securities markets whether we file this application or not.” That statement captures the inevitability many in finance now see. But perhaps more importantly, this approach represents a different path from the crypto-native projects that have dominated tokenization discussions.
Instead of building parallel systems outside regulatory oversight, F/m is asking permission to bring blockchain record-keeping into the existing system. It’s tokenization on regulators’ terms, which might actually be the more practical route for widespread adoption. Short-term treasuries make sense as a test case—they’re liquid, well-understood, and represent one of the safest asset classes available.
The broader context
This isn’t happening in isolation. Over the past year, tokenization of real-world assets has gained real momentum across traditional finance. BlackRock’s digital liquidity fund has grown quickly on Ethereum, showing that institutional interest isn’t just theoretical. JPMorgan recently launched its own tokenized money-market fund for institutional clients.
Major banks and asset managers are clearly exploring this space, but they’re doing so cautiously, within existing regulatory structures. The TBIL proposal feels like part of this broader trend—established financial players testing blockchain technology in controlled, incremental ways.
What comes next
If the SEC approves this, it could open doors for similar applications. Other ETF issuers might follow, testing tokenization with different asset classes. But I think the real significance lies in the approach itself. By keeping everything else unchanged—the trading, the holdings, the investor experience—they’re minimizing disruption while still experimenting with new technology.
It’s a pragmatic move, really. Test blockchain’s potential benefits (maybe faster settlement, maybe better transparency) without asking investors to change their behavior. Let the technology prove itself in the background first. That seems smarter than forcing everyone onto a new system all at once.
We’ll have to wait for the SEC’s response, of course. Regulatory approval isn’t guaranteed. But the filing itself shows how traditional finance is thinking about blockchain now—not as a replacement for everything, but as a potential enhancement to existing systems. It’s a subtle shift, but an important one.
