By
Temitope Olatunji
April 24th, 2024
The OpenEden TBILL tokens are Ethereum-based ERC-20 standards that are transferable between different blockchain wallets.
Former senior officials at the Gemini crypto exchange announced that OpenEden, a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform, had launched the first smart contract vault to offer access to US Treasury Bills (T-Bills). According to the announcement, OpenEden will enable stablecoins holders to mint Treasury Bills (T-BILL) tokens through the OpenEden T-BILL Vaul. As a result, OpenEden users can earn a US risk-free rate, with yields of about 4.8 percent per annum starting from March 2023.
Notably, Jeremy Ng and Eugene Ng, both co-founders at OpenEden, worked at Gemini’s ex-Asia Pacific head and former head of business development for the region, respectively. OpenEden is backed by several institutional investors including Circle the issuer of USDC, KPMG, Elliptic, DBS, Chainlink, and Harneys.
According to OpenEden, the TBILL tokens are Ethereum-based ERC-20 standards that are transferable between different blockchain wallets.
“From the start, we wanted to create the opposite of a ‘trust me bro’ product for DAO treasuries, Web3 institutions, and crypto funds,” Jeremy stated. “There is around $130 billion worth of stablecoins sitting on the sidelines and not generating any meaningful yield. As DeFi yields continue to lag further behind traditional financial asset yields, there is a growing demand for institutional-grade DeFi products that offer low-risk, liquid, and transparent returns to stablecoin holders.”
Similar sentiments were shared by Eugene who stated that OpenEden has spent the past year developing institutional-grade regulated DeFi products. Moreover, the OpenEden protocol taps into the Chainlink network, which connects oracles from the real world to the blockchain industry.
“The OpenEden TBILL Vault not only facilitates on-chain access to US Treasury yields but it is also integrated with a Chainlink Proof-of-Reserves to provide real-time transparency into the underlying assets of TBILL tokens,” Eugene added.
OpenEden to the World
OpenEden was launched earlier in 2022 by a team with decades in institutional finance and technology having worked with Gemini, Goldman Sachs Group Inc (NYSE: GS), Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS), Deutsche Bank AG (Xetra: DBK), Barclays PLC (NYSE: BCS), BlockFi, Bybit, and Binance.
Notably, the issuer of TBILL tokens, Hill Lights International Ltd, is described as a professional fund established under the British Virgin Islands Securities and Investment Business Act 2010. On the other hand, OpenEden Pte Ltd, the investment manager of the OpenEden TBILL Vault, is a Registered Fund Management Company under the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
By tokenizing real-world assets, OpenEden hopes to open up the blockchain industry to a $300 trillion market that is yet to be tapped on a global scale. Moreover, the cryptocurrency market is about $1 trillion despite being in existence for the past 14 years. Nevertheless, the industry has earned a global reputation over traditional stock markets after gaining value through the Covid pandemic and also the banking crisis.