Aviva Investors has added a tokenized share class of its £22 billion Sterling Liquidity Fund on the XRP Ledger, less than three months after putting its dollar cash fund onchain.
Key Takeaways
- Tokenized classes hold £86M, not £22B
- Sterling class follows July’s dollar launch on XRPL
- Aviva pitches transferability; holders must still pass KYC
- Fund subscriptions are not XRP purchases
Financial News reported on October 26 that Aviva’s two tokenized share classes, sterling and dollar, now hold more than £86 million combined. Even counted together, that is under 0.4% of the sterling fund’s size on its own.
£22B
Sterling Liquidity Fund, all share classes
£86M+
Both tokenized classes combined
July 29
Dollar class goes live on XRPL
Why Aviva added a sterling class
Aviva’s first tokenized share class, launched on July 29, put shares of its US Dollar Liquidity Fund on XRPL after approval from the Central Bank of Ireland. A share class is a separate line of shares in the same fund, in this case one recorded on a blockchain. The fund itself invests in short-term, high-grade dollar debt.
That product only suited investors who wanted dollars. A UK treasury team holding pounds for payroll or supplier bills would take on exchange-rate risk by parking the cash in a dollar fund, and an investor holding dollar stablecoins would pay conversion costs to move into sterling. A sterling class lets pound-based cash stay in pounds.
Aviva’s case for adding more tokenized classes is about distribution. In an October 20 piece on money market funds, it argued that yields across competing funds sit within a few basis points of each other, so platform experience, system integration and transparency increasingly decide where institutional cash goes.
“Platform access is now almost as important as the fund itself.”
Aviva Investors, October 20
How the tokens are held
The dollar class set the template. Aviva said BNY Mellon holds the fund’s assets as custodian, Komainu provides regulated custody on the digital side and Licuido supplies the tokenization technology.
Komainu has described it as a digital-twin model: each token mirrors a share in the existing fund, whose structure and investor protections stay in place. Komainu guards the keys that control the tokens, while BNY Mellon holds the short-term debt the fund actually owns.
What the tokens can do so far
The £86 million figure is a small fraction of the money sitting in Aviva’s conventional share classes, and it does not show how many investors are behind it. Franklin Templeton’s experience is a reminder of why that matters: its XRPL fund shares turned out to sit largely in one wallet.
Aviva’s October piece names transferability as the main benefit of tokenized money market funds, alongside round-the-clock trading and near-instant settlement. That list describes tokenized funds in general rather than the terms of Aviva’s own classes. The July release limits the dollar class to eligible investors with digital wallets, the same October piece notes that new clients face full know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering checks, and Structured Retail Products reported after the launch that the dollar tokens are not freely transferable.
Turning tokens back into cash also runs through the conventional fund. Aviva’s piece notes that money market funds of this type process subscriptions and redemptions on dealing days with daily cut-offs, and the digital-twin model keeps the existing fund register as the record the tokens mirror.
What it means for XRP
Aviva’s launches have been widely covered as XRP news, but subscriptions buy fund shares backed by short-term sterling and dollar debt. The XRP involved is the network fee. XRPL destroys a minimum of 10 drops, or 0.00001 XRP, per standard transaction, rising only when the network is under heavy load. Issuing, moving or redeeming fund tokens burns tiny amounts of XRP, whatever the fund’s size.
The test of Aviva’s distribution bet is how many separate investors hold the tokens and how often shares move between them, rather than the size of the fund behind them. At £86 million across two currencies, that test has barely started.
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coindoo and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets – crypto first, then everything else.
It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn’t fully understand it – so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can’t properly understand one without the other.
What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it’s happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline – price up, price down, here’s a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn?
He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University – not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That’s probably why he hasn’t stopped.
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