Aviva Invests £50 Million in Tokenized Share Class of Existing Liquidity Fund
Key Facts
Aviva Investors and Ripple announced on October 26 the launch of a tokenized share class for the Aviva Sterling Liquidity Fund on the XRP Ledger, the company’s second tokenization of an existing fund. Aviva invested £50 million, equivalent to $66 million, in the new share class at launch. The existing fund has about £22 billion in assets, making it Aviva Investors’ largest. That figure refers to the traditional fund’s assets and does not mean they have all been moved onto the network; the announced investment in the tokenized share class is £50 million. The move expands the company’s tokenized offerings to include a sterling-denominated share class, following the dollar share class launched in July.
Taking the two share classes together, investment in Aviva’s tokenized offerings has exceeded £86 million, or $116 million, according to Ripple’s announcement. On July 29, the company launched a tokenized share class for its dollar liquidity fund, its first fund tokenization. The new launch adds sterling alongside the dollar in the company’s offerings based on digital representations of fund shares. The sterling fund is an Ireland-domiciled money market fund governed by the UCITS framework. The traditional fund was launched in 2002, making the new share class an extension of a product that has been in place for more than two decades.
The fund targets low-risk returns and daily liquidity, investing in high-quality, short-term debt instruments denominated in sterling. The announcement did not describe these instruments as British government bonds. The company says the tokenized share class retains the same investment objective, risk profile, liquidity characteristics and regulatory protections as the traditional fund. The fund uses a “digital twin” model, representing holdings on-chain while keeping the fund structure off-chain. The tokenization therefore applies to the share class and how it is represented digitally, while the fund’s assets remain within its usual structure and custody arrangements.
The new share class is available to eligible investors with digital wallets, according to the announcement. The fund’s custodian, BNY Mellon, holds all its assets. Zodia supported the launch as institutional custodian of digital assets, while Laser Digital provided the digital infrastructure needed to tokenize and trade the assets. Aviva Investors Chief Executive Mark Versey said the company believes that “tokenized funds could increase efficiency and ultimately lead to improved customer outcomes.” The announcement presents the move as expanding access to a share class of an existing fund for eligible investors through digital wallets.
Ripple’s announcement said the XRP Ledger has processed more than 4 billion transactions since 2012, supports nearly 8 million active wallets and is maintained by more than 130 independent validators. These figures are given in the context of using the network to record digital representations of fund shares, while its assets remain with the custodian. In a study published in April 2026, the European Central Bank estimated the tokenized money market fund market at about €7 billion, including about €725 million in funds domiciled in the European Union, and said market value had nearly doubled in a year. It noted, however, that the market remains small compared with traditional funds. The study found that about half of tokenized funds still use a traditional register as their primary ownership ledger, and none of the largest funds it examined operates fully on-chain.
The European Central Bank warned that managing traditional and distributed-ledger infrastructure through multiple intermediaries could increase operational risks, and that the effect of tokenized funds on financial stability depends on their design and market development. It also said that describing trading as available around the clock does not necessarily eliminate traditional cut-off times, which remain in many cases, and redemptions may require off-chain steps during business hours. The International Monetary Fund concluded that atomic settlement could reduce counterparty risk and operational friction, but would increase the need for intraday liquidity when settlement delays are removed. It warned that poorly designed automated redemption or margin-call mechanisms could accelerate outflows during periods of stress. In available market data, AVVIY shares closed at $19.17 on October 23, 2026.