Invesco’s $1B Superstate Partnership Shows Wall Street Is Moving Onchain

Wall Street may have thought tokenizing assets was a cute experiment before, but things are rapidly accelerating now.

The $2.2 trillion asset manager Invesco announced Tuesday that the firm most famous for its Nasdaq-100 QQQ ETF is partnering with Superstate to run one of the largest tokenized funds. At nearly $1 billion in assets onchain, Superstate Short Duration US Government Securities Fund (USTB) marks yet another example of a joint operation between a crypto-native blockchain firm and a Wall Street behemoth.

As Superstate co-founder Jim Hiltner explained to Coinage in a new interview, the deal doesn't just represent a validation moment for the tokenization trend, but also the growing faith among Wall Street's biggest players to adopt new technology.

“We built our business over the last few years to get to this moment to demonstrate that you could build institutional-grade technology ... for investors to interact with blockchains using very liquid, very stable assets underneath the hood for a variety of use cases," he said. "It also validates what Superstate has built not only for us, but for future products for us to work on together with Invesco and other asset managers and other issuers of all types."

As Invesco takes over managing USTB, it will operate as a top-five tokenized fund in a category led by BlackRock's BUIDL fund at more than $1.5 billion.

Tokenization firm Securitize helped get BlackRock's fund off the ground, and like Securitize, Superstate is looking to leverage its role as a transfer agent in more arenas than just tokenized money market funds. As Hiltner explained, the same efficiencies that blockchains are bringing to distributing access to Treasuries offer just the same upside for nearly every other asset.

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Superstate is also currently working to tokenize shares in companies by helping with direct issuances on Ethereum and Solana.

“What tokenization basically does is bring securities and dollars onto the same platform in order for buyers and sellers to meet,” he said, arguing that issuers now see a growing pool of onchain capital they simply cannot reach if they remain offchain. "The issuer and the investor can be directly interacting with each other through a token, which is not possible in today's capital markets, which goes through a bunch of intermediaries."

For a crypto industry that has spent years insisting Wall Street would eventually come onchain, another player like Invesco embracing tokenization may be one of the clearest signs yet that the process is no longer theoretical.

"You're going to see a Cambrian explosion of that this year," Hiltner said.

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