Wall Street Titan Guggenheim Tokenizes $20M of Commercial Paper on Ethereum

• Guggenheim Treasury Services and blockchain platform Zeconomy issued $20 million of tokenized commercial paper on the Ethereum blockchain.

• Zeconomy CEO Giacinto Cosenza said he sees “massive demand” for digital assets, as demonstrated by the success of crypto ETFs.

Guggenheim Treasury Services, a subsidiary of financial services giant Guggenheim Partners, has issued $20 million of tokenized commercial paper on the Ethereum blockchain, its partner, blockchain platform Zeconomy, announced Thursday.

A spokesperson for Guggenheim confirmed the transaction took place but would not comment further.

The tokenization comes weeks after German industrial giant Siemens AG issued digital commercial paper via megabank JPMorgan’s Onyx and blockchain platform SWIAT.

Tokenization of traditional financial instruments, referred to as real-world assets (RWA), has become one of the hottest areas in crypto for TradFi firms to dabble in lately. The niche has grown to a $12 billion market capitalization, including $2 billion of tokenized U.S. government securities, according to research firm RWA.XYZ.

“With tens of billions of dollars locked in DeFi and corporate treasuries, we are thrilled to partner with GTS to address a clear need for more trusted and secure blockchain solutions,” said Giacinto Cosenza, Zeconomy’s CEO, in a statement.

“As clearly demonstrated by the ETFs approval and the growth of the tokenization space, there is a massive demand for these digital assets, and we want to enable our partners so they can be at the forefront of what could be a transformative moment in the financial industry,” he said.

The commercial paper was rated P-1, the highest credit rating available for such instruments, by Moody’s Investors Service. Commercial paper is short-term (less than a year, usually 30 days), unsecured debt issued by corporations.

While RWA is a new direction for Guggenheim, which boasts a whopping $300 billion in assets under management (AUM), the global investment firm has previously participated in the crypto ecosystem.

The firm’s Macro Opportunities Funds has for years been authorized to take on up to 10% exposure to the former Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), which in January converted into one of the spot bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds (ETF).