Aviva Investors has launched a tokenized share class of its £22 billion Sterling Liquidity Fund on the XRP Ledger, the asset manager said Monday. The move extends the firm's existing partnership with Ripple, the company behind the XRP cryptocurrency and the ledger network. It follows Aviva's first tokenized money market fund, introduced in July.
What actually launched
This is a tokenized share class, not a new fund. The underlying portfolio — a sterling-denominated liquidity fund managing roughly £22 billion — stays where it is. What changes is how investors can hold a slice of it: as a digital token recorded on the XRP Ledger rather than through conventional fund units. Aviva hasn't disclosed how much of the fund's assets will migrate to the tokenized class, nor which investors are participating first.
The XRP Ledger is a public blockchain that settles transactions in seconds and has been pitched by Ripple primarily at cross-border payments and, more recently, at institutional tokenization. For Aviva, the appeal is likely operational: faster settlement and the ability to move fund shares around the clock, without building a private chain from scratch.
Why a liquidity fund is the test case
Liquidity funds are the part of the money market where speed matters most. They hold short-term, high-quality debt and are built for parking cash with same-day or next-day access. Tokenizing a share class lets the fund's units behave more like the cash instruments they track — settling on a ledger instead of waiting on traditional transfer agents and banking cutoffs.
That makes them a natural first step for asset managers testing blockchain rails. Aviva's July launch was the same kind of experiment, and Monday's announcement turns it into a repeatable playbook rather than a one-off.
The Ripple partnership, extended
Aviva and Ripple have been working together since before the July fund. Monday's launch deepens that arrangement without changing its shape: Ripple supplies the ledger and the institutional infrastructure, Aviva supplies the fund and the regulatory wrapper. Neither firm has said whether more Aviva funds will follow on the same rails, or whether the tokenized class will be opened to retail investors. For now it's an institutional product.
What the tokenized fund trend still lacks
Tokenized money market funds have proliferated over the past two years, with several large managers launching blockchain-based share classes. The pitch is uniform — faster settlement, programmable cash, collateral that can move at any hour. What's been slower to arrive is scale. Most tokenized funds hold a small fraction of their parent fund's assets, and secondary trading in the tokens remains thin.
Aviva's £22 billion fund gives the effort a larger base to work from than many earlier launches. Whether that translates into meaningful tokenized volume is the open question. The company hasn't published a target for assets in the new share class, and there's no date yet for when the first external investors will be able to subscribe.
What happens next
Aviva says the tokenized class is live as of Monday. The next milestones to watch are the first disclosed inflows into the share class and whether Aviva extends the model to other funds in its liquidity range. Ripple, meanwhile, gets another blue-chip name to point to as it courts asset managers in Europe — a market where tokenization rules are still being written country by country.
