What exactly did Aviva announce?
According to DL News, on 26 October Aviva Investors launched a tokenized share class of its Aviva Investors Sterling (GBP) Liquidity Fund. This class gives eligible investors access to the fund through digital tokens on the XRP Ledger.
Two numbers that are easy to mix up in the story:
| Figure | Value | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| £50 million | Aviva's investment | How much Aviva itself put into the new tokenized share class |
| £22 billion | Size of the whole fund | The size of the entire underlying Sterling Liquidity Fund, not the tokenized part |
In other words: the £22 billion describes the entire fund, not the size of the tokenized segment. The tokenized part starts with the aforementioned £50 million from Aviva itself (source: DL News).
What is a tokenized share class?
Tokenization in this case means that ownership of a stake in the fund is recorded as a token on a blockchain (here the XRP Ledger), instead of existing only in the fund manager's traditional register.
The key point is what does not change: the underlying asset remains the same money market (liquidity) fund. What changes is the ownership record layer. The investor holds a claim to the same fund, only the record that it belongs to them lives on a blockchain.
A liquidity fund is a type of money market fund that holds short-term, highly liquid instruments. It is typically used by institutions for cash management.
Why do institutions do this?
The stated rationale for tokenizing fund shares tends to be faster settlement, programmability, and 24/7 record keeping. Whether and how these benefits play out in practice for Aviva's product is not clearly evident from the announcement, which is why we do not present it as an established fact.
What is verified: Aviva Investors, as a large conventional asset manager, entered tokenization through its own regulated fund and its own capital. That is a different model from the tokenization of third-party shares without their consent, which is discussed below.
How does this fit into the broader tokenization trend?
Aviva's move is not an isolated case. At the same time, two things are happening in the industry that show the tokenization of real-world assets is advancing but also running into friction.
Tokenized shares as collateral for loans
According to The Defiant, the Kamino protocol opened loans in the USDC stablecoin against tokenized shares from the Backpack platform. Borrowers can obtain up to 40% of the collateral value. Outside US trading hours, the market holds the last known price of the share. This illustrates how tokenized shares are starting to be used as collateral in DeFi.
Companies that do not want their shares tokenized
On the other side is the dispute over the planned OKX-ICE platform for trading tokenized shares. According to Decrypt and CoinDesk, more companies have objected to the trading of their shares on this platform, among them JPMorgan Chase, Coca-Cola and Dell. The total number of companies protesting has thereby risen to 33, almost half of the original list (source: Decrypt, CoinDesk).
The difference is fundamental: Aviva is tokenizing its own product with its own consent and capital. The OKX-ICE platform, according to reporting, faces resistance from companies whose shares are meant to be tokenized without their permission.
What does this really change for investors?
Based on verified sources, the following can be said:
- The nature of the underlying asset does not change. With Aviva, it is still the same Sterling Liquidity Fund.
- The technical layer of ownership recording does change (a token on the XRP Ledger).
- The use of tokenized securities in DeFi is increasing, such as lending against collateral (the Kamino/Backpack example).
- The question of issuer consent and the regulatory framework remains unresolved, as shown by companies' resistance to OKX-ICE.
This is not investment advice. It is a description of what happened and a separation of fact from speculation.
What to watch with this type of news
- Who is an eligible investor and under what conditions they have access to the tokenized class (the announcement does not spell this out in detail).
- What the actual volume of the tokenized class will be after the initial £50 million.
- How issuer consent will be resolved for platforms that tokenize other companies' shares.
- What risks come with using tokenized shares as collateral, especially pricing outside trading hours.