According to Blockworks, digital asset liquidity provider Enigma Securities has partnered with Circle-backed tech company OpenTrade to bring US Treasury bill-backed yield products on-chain. The product will be available to Enigma's institutional clients through their existing OTC (over-the-counter) trading desk set-up. Jeff Handler, the chief commercial officer and co-founder of OpenTrade, estimates the annualized yield for these real-world asset (RWA) backed products to be between 4.5% to 5%.
Transactions for these products will be conducted as fixed-term, fixed-rate secure loans in USDC, facilitated entirely by Enigma. The Enigma OTC company has been established for the sole purpose of processing these secured loans, which will include buying, custodying, and selling the underlying assets backing the loans to financial institution counterparties. Handler believes that it is important to have regulated offerings of crypto assets for clients, as it offers customers legal protection.
Enigma Securities will not be the first company to offer tokenized US T-bills to its clients. Information compiled by rwa.xyz shows that the total tokenized treasury product market has reached over $858 million, with Franklin Templeton's Benji product, which uses the Stellar blockchain, being the largest at $331 million.
These latest RWA-backed products will be available to Enigma's client base across Europe, Latin America, and Asia. US investors will not be able to purchase these offerings. According to Handler, Latin American clients have shown particularly high interest in yield products backed by RWAs. He believes this is likely a function of the demand for USD-denominated financial assets that can provide stable and predictable returns, noting that local currencies in LatAm countries have historically been subject to high amounts of volatility, limiting their ability to save and accumulate wealth.
