State Street Works on Tokenized Bond and Money Market Fund; No 'Current Plans' for Stablecoin Project

Boston-based asset management and banking giant State Street (STT) is working on bond and money market fund tokenization, but has no imminent plans to create a stablecoin or tokenized deposits, according to a bank executive.

“We don’t have a current plan to issue a stablecoin or tokenise a deposit,” said Donna Milrod, the bank's chief product officer, in an interview with Financial News. “That doesn’t mean we won’t at some point, but we don’t feel the need to do that right now.” A July report by Bloomberg said State Street was exploring crafting a stablecoin and developing tokenized deposits.

Instead, the company has two ongoing tokenization projects focusing on tokenizing a bond and a money market fund, which will take the company "through part of next year,” Milrod said. The aim is to build tokenized collateral that would allow traders to use as margin, without the need to liquidate their holdings to post cash.

Traditional finance heavyweights and global banks are getting increasingly involved in the tokenization of traditional financial instruments, or real-world assets (RWA), placing bonds, funds, credit or commodities onto blockchain rails. The process promises operational benefits such as increased efficiency, faster and around-the-clock settlements and lower administrative costs.

"Operational efficiency alone, that’s not enough. It needs to be something commercial," Milrod said in the interview. "The industry is figuring out where the commercial value is."

Milrod added that collateral tokens could have helped avoid or lessen, for example, the "liability-driven" crisis in 2022, where pension funds could have used money market fund tokens for margin calls instead of liquidating their assets to raise cash.

State Street has also been growing its presence in the digital asset industry, selecting Switzerland-based Taurus as a tokenization partner, CoinDesk reported in August. Milrod said then that the bank would also offer custody for digital assets once the U.S. regulatory environment improves.