- Key insight: Superstate has selected Invesco to externally manage its tokenized "USTB" treasury fund.
- Supporting data: The USTB fund has ~$950 million in AUM, as one of the largest tokenized treasury funds in the market.
- Forward look: The integration of the fund to Invesco is expected to be complete in mid-2026.
Invesco is expanding its digital asset products by becoming the portfolio manager for an existing tokenized treasury fund.
The global asset management firm has partnered with tokenization platform Superstate to white-label and manage its private, short-duration U.S. government securities fund, known as USTB.
Upon completion of the transition, which is expected to be in mid-2026, the USTB fund will be formally renamed the Invesco Short-Duration U.S. Government Securities Fund, while maintaining the same USTB ticker, smart contracts and token address.
Invesco will take over day-to-day portfolio management responsibilities, according to a company statement, while Superstate will continue to support the technical infrastructure behind the tokenized fund.
"Our view was to leverage what we do best, which is investment management, risk management and distribution, and partner with a leading provider when it comes to the on-chain infrastructure component," Kathleen Wrynn, Invesco's global head of digital assets, told American Banker. "We're very excited to be the first asset manager to be using Superstate infrastructure. That's critical for us to be able to scale going forward."
Tokenized money market funds, or TMMFs, are funds holding U.S. government-issued treasuries, and in turn individual shares of those funds are encrypted into digital "tokens" that can be stored on distributed ledgers as a digital asset, much like stablecoins or cryptocurrencies.
The announcement comes as banks and investment firms are expressing increased interest in digital assets and looking into tokenization as an option for bringing existing portfolios on-chain.
At this point, according to Superstate CEO Robert Leshner, the primary demand for treasury-backed tokenized funds comes from investors already operating in crypto and digital asset markets.
He anticipates that tokenization will become a dominant form of recordkeeping for investment products in the next decade or so, but until then he is focusing on expanding the built-in customer base of investors already trading on distributed ledgers.
"When Invesco enters the picture, it's going to expand the types of investors that are interested in this kind of product," Leshner told American Banker.
USTB is among the
Launched in early 2024, USTB was Superstate's first tokenized fund. In the past two years, it has onboarded around 150 different institutional investors and has processed billions of dollars of transactions, according to the company.
Superstate's USTB is a private Section 3c7 fund, according to Leshner, which means it is only open to institutional investors and is not registered for trading on an exchange such as Nasdaq.
"It basically sits in parallel to exchange-traded products," he said.
The USTB fund, upon completion of the integration, will be Invesco's first blockchain-linked private fund in the U.S. The asset manager currently holds five other U.S.-based digital asset funds and has been involved in the digital asset space since 2019, according to Wrynn, but the other funds are all exchange-traded products, or ETPs.
"On one hand, we want to continue launching crypto-linked products like ETPs, as that's where we're seeing a lot of demand from existing clients to get crypto exposure," she said. "But that second vertical is something newer to us. We're exploring how we can actually tokenize funds and play a meaningful role going forward in a tokenization race that we're experiencing."
