Polkadot’s Web3 Foundation to put $1m in US tokenized treasury bills, DOT jumps 6%

The Web3 Foundation, dedicated to the development of the Polkadot ecosystem, has announced a $1 million seed investment in tokenized treasury bills.

In an X post on Nov. 29, 2023 the Web3 Foundation unveiled plans to put $1 million in tokenized U.S. treasury bills via Centrifuge, an institutional ecosystem for on-chain credit. With the investment, the foundation is said to become the first user of the real-world asset use-case supported and managed through the para-chain in a bit to digitize assets with blockchain technology.

Web3 Foundation Chief Executive Fabian Gompf said in a blog post that the industry of tokenized assets has “massive potential and are steadfast in our commitment to help grow the industry and Centrifuge protocol.” Gompf noted that the $1 million investment is just a start, adding that the foundation expects to “quickly grow beyond that.”

After the news broke, Polkadot’s native cryptocurrency DOT jumped by 6% up to $5.4, bringing its market capitalization to $7.1 billion, according to CoinGecko.

The race for asset tokenization is apparently just getting started as the British Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) only in late November 2023 officially granted investment managers with a permission to develop tokenized funds based on a blockchain as the country seeks to benefit from the global digitization trend.

In early Nov. 2023, British bank HSBC also announced its latest blockchain endeavor in partnership with a Ripple-owned firm Metaco to service institutional clients with demand for real-world assets hosted on a blockchain.

According to the Boston Consulting Group, the total size of illiquid asset tokenization globally is expected to hit the $16 trillion mark by 2030 given that a “large chunk of the world’s wealth today is locked in illiquid assets.”