After Backed Finance added Chainlink’s price feeds, the tokenization project is now launching its various tokenized products to a variety of networks.
Backed is a DeFi project working in the tokenization and real-world asset sector. This means it’s attempting to onboard popular traditional assets, such as stocks and bonds, onto the blockchain.
The networks included in this launch are BNB Chain, Polygon, Gnosis, Avalanche, Fantom, and Arbitrum. The project was originally launched on Ethereum. The tokenization project has indicated that it will support additional networks in the future.
“It’s about bringing our products directly to these active ecosystems and offering flexibility to users,” Backed Finance co-founder Adam Levi told Decrypt on the move. “We want to remain technology neutral and encourage RWA [real-world asset] adoption across the entire sector, not just a specific blockchain.”
Chainlink’s price feeds offer projects decentralized pricing data for different assets to ensure the value of an asset is accurate. Backed Finance’s assets include a tokenized version of Coinbase’s COIN stock, an S&P 500 index fund, and several different tokenized bond offerings.
“So far, So far, bIB01 has been our most popular, which is a tokenized ETF tracker of short-term US treasury bonds,” Levi said. “We’re looking to expand our Euro-denominated securities, and you can expect a tokenized version of a Euro ultrashort bond tracker.”
Backed joins tokenization trend
The niche, initially heralded as one of blockchain’s key use cases, has gained serious steam of late.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, for instance, called tokenization the “next generation for markets” last year.
Diving deeper into the data, tokenized securities on Ethereum, Polygon, and Gnosis hit $225 million last year and just last month Avalanche launched a $50 million tokenization initiative to spur activity.
Still, for all its hype, it’s a trend that’s excluded Americans.
Backed Finance users, for example, must declare that they are not U.S. citizens.
“The current regulatory environment in the US presents too many uncertainties for blockchain-based financial innovation,” Levi told Decrypt. “As regulations become clearer, it is definitely something we’d like to explore, but we could not give a timeline.”