Switzerland’s foremost asset management bank, UBS, is making waves in the blockchain world with the rollout of its inaugural pilot tokenizing a Variable Capital Company (VCC) fund on the Ethereum blockchain out of Singapore. Included as an integral part of the wider VCC umbrella designed to incorporate an array of real-life assets into the blockchain, the UBS project is a component of Project Guardian. This is a bigger industry collaboration to tokenize real-world assets, overseen by Singapore’s central bank and finance regulator, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).
The VCC fund is legally acknowledged as an investment entity in the region, originally launched in 2020 to reinforce Singapore’s stance as an essential hub for operations involving fund management. Thomas Kaegi, the Head of UBS Asset Management for Singapore and Southeast Asia believes this momentous achievement in fund tokenization could mark a significant parallel shift within the finance sphere, signaling UBS’s dedication towards collaborating with long-standing financial institutions and trending fintech providers with the aim of enriching market accessibility for keen investors.
Interestingly, UBS took to the stage to execute the controlled pilot of this tokenized money market fund through its proprietary ‘UBS Tokenize’ system, dubbed as the firm’s gateway to myriad activities like subscriptions and redemptions, deployed through carefully constructed smart contracts on the Ethereum public blockchain.
Even as the optimism around this new endeavor resonates, it is clear that UBS aims to broaden its horizons under Project Guardian. Mark November 3 in your calendars, crypto-enthusiasts! That’s when UBS launched its first-ever digital bond to be publicly traded followed by an issue of a $50 million tokenized fixed rate note.
Fast-forward to June 9, this time in Hong Kong, UBS Tokenize found a novel application in issuing digital structured notes for Bank of China Investment. The total sum? A whopping CNH 200 million ($27.3M), all tokenized notes minted and deployed on the Ethereum blockchain.
Having only recently emerged on the scene, UBS’s tokenized service and VCC fund certainly have the potential and force to engineer a revolutionary shift in the panorama of digital assets and potentially the wider financial system in the years to come, a projection that has everyone in the digital asset space eagerly waiting to see what’s next. Whether this will lead to the mainstream adoption of blockchain technology or not, only time will tell. But it sure has lit up the road to it, bright enough for everyone to take notice.
Source: Cryptonews
