Aviva puts its £22B sterling money fund on the XRP Ledger

Aviva Investors, the asset management arm of British insurer Aviva, has launched a tokenized share class of its largest fund, the roughly £22 billion ($29.4 billion) Sterling Liquidity Fund, on the XRP Ledger, Ripple and Aviva said in a joint announcement on Monday, also reported by The Block and Cointelegraph.

What launched

• A new tokenized share class of the Sterling Liquidity Fund, a money market fund that invests in high-grade, short-term sterling debt and offers daily liquidity. The fund dates back to 2002, is domiciled in Ireland and is regulated as a UCITS money market fund.
• Aviva seeded it with £50 million of its own money. Across its two tokenized share classes it now has more than £86 million invested.
• It follows a tokenized USD Liquidity Fund share class that went live on the XRP Ledger on July 29 with Central Bank of Ireland approval.

How the "digital twin" works

The fund keeps operating off-chain exactly as before; what moves on-chain is the record of who owns shares. Investors need an eligible digital wallet to hold them. BNY Mellon remains custodian of the fund's assets, while digital asset custodian Komainu and infrastructure platform Licuido supported the launch. Aviva says the tokenized shares have the same objective, risk profile, liquidity and regulatory protections as the conventional ones. Our guide to what tokenization is explains why fund managers are doing this.

Why it matters

Tokenized money market funds are becoming the "cash" layer of on-chain finance, and Aviva now calls itself one of Europe's largest providers of them. For the XRP Ledger it is another institutional win after Franklin Templeton's Benji expansion. Still, scale is modest: RWA.xyz data cited by Cointelegraph puts XRPL ninth among blockchains for tokenized assets, with about $642 million of distributed real-world assets and around 2,900 holders. Aviva Investors CEO Mark Versey said tokenized funds "can increase efficiency and ultimately lead to improved client outcomes" and that more products with Ripple are being explored. For background on the network itself, see what XRP is.