Aviva puts a share class of its £22 billion sterling money fund on the XRP Ledger, but the first £50 million is Aviva’s own

Aviva Investors has launched a tokenized share class of its Sterling Liquidity Fund on the XRP Ledger, the asset manager and Ripple announced on Monday 26 October. The fund behind it is large: about £22 billion (roughly $29.4 billion), Aviva’s biggest. The new token class is not. It starts with £50 million, and that money is Aviva’s own, according to Ripple’s press release and The Block. No outside subscriber has been named.

This is the second tokenized class Aviva Investors has put on the XRP Ledger (XRPL), after a dollar class of its USD Liquidity Fund in July. Over £86 million ($116 million, in the release’s own conversion) is now invested across the two classes. The release says that makes Aviva Investors “one of the largest tokenised Money Market Fund providers in Europe”. Set beside the dollar funds of BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and J.P. Morgan, it is still a small player.

“We believe tokenised funds can increase efficiency and ultimately lead to improved client outcomes,” Mark Versey, chief executive of Aviva Investors, said in the release. Nigel Khakoo, Ripple’s senior vice president for trading and markets, put it in market terms: “Markets are moving to 24/7 access and settlement is moving to real-time, always-on rails.”

Where the £22 billion ends and the £50 million begins

Several headlines on Monday carried the $29 billion figure. That is the size of the whole Aviva Investors Sterling Liquidity Fund, an Irish-domiciled UCITS money market fund launched in 2002 that buys high-grade, short-term sterling debt and offers daily liquidity. The tokenized class is a new door into that fund, with £50 million behind it on day one. Outlets converted that to between $66 million and $66.7 million.

Put the two side by side and the tokenized class is about 0.23% of the fund. The other 99.8% stays in conventional share classes, held and traded the way it was last week.

The £86 million total across both classes gives a rough size for the dollar class too. If £50 million sits in the new sterling class, about £36 million is left for the USD class. That subtraction is Coindaro’s own, not a company figure. It roughly fits the tracker rwa.xyz, which lists Aviva’s USD Liquidity Fund token at $50.05 million on 26 October, or about £37.5 million at the exchange rate implied by the $29.4 billion conversion.

Seed money from the manager itself is a common way to start a new fund or share class. It proves the plumbing works. It does not tell anyone whether pension funds, treasurers or other institutions will move cash into the token version. Aviva has not said whether any have, and crypto.news noted that the companies did not disclose how many outside investors had subscribed.

A “digital twin” of a fund share, not a new fund

Ripple calls the model a digital twin. Holdings are represented on the XRP Ledger while the fund itself keeps its existing off-chain structure. According to the release, holders of the tokenized class get the same investment objective, risk profile, liquidity and regulatory protections as investors in the conventional shares.

All of the fund’s assets stay with its custodian, The Bank of New York Mellon (BNY), the release says. Two crypto-side firms supported the launch, as they had for the dollar class: Komainu, a regulated custodian of digital assets for institutions, and Licuido, a platform that lets asset managers tokenize and trade real-world assets. Licuido is also the platform rwa.xyz names for the July dollar token.

How the dollar class works is the best guide available, because the sterling class has no published terms yet. In July, Ledger Insights reported that each USD token was linked to a conventional share and “cannot exist independently of such traditional share”, in the words of the prospectus it quoted. The tokens could be minted and redeemed but not transferred between holders, the book entry was reconciled daily, and the minimum was £1 million. Holders could keep the tokens in their own wallet.

If the sterling class follows the same rules, the token is a mirror of a register entry, not a bearer asset that trades on its own. Nobody at Aviva or Ripple has said so for this class, though.

What is still unknown about the sterling class

Ripple’s release says the class is open to “eligible investors with digital wallets”. That is all it says about access. None of the sources published on Monday, nor the July coverage of the dollar class, answers the following:

• Who the transfer agent is. No transfer agent is named for either class, a gap next to BlackRock’s fund, whose register is kept by Securitize.
• The minimum subscription. The dollar class had £1 million; nothing is published for sterling.
• Whether the tokens can move between holders, or only be minted and redeemed, and how wallets are approved.
• The issuing address on the XRP Ledger. Without it, the £50 million is the company’s figure and cannot be checked on-chain.
• Whether the Central Bank of Ireland approved the sterling class. Its approval was announced for the dollar class in July; for this one, the release names no regulator and speaks only of “existing regulatory frameworks”.
• Fees, yield, ISIN and a factsheet. We found none for the token class.

The on-chain point matters more than it sounds. When we looked at Franklin Templeton’s money fund on the XRP Ledger last week, the ledger showed a single wallet holding every share. A public address for the Aviva token would let anyone see whether the £50 million sits in one wallet too, and when a second holder arrives.

From a February partnership to a second share class in nine months

The partnership began on 11 February 2026, when Aviva Investors and Ripple said they would explore tokenizing traditional fund structures on the XRP Ledger. It was Ripple’s first collaboration with a European investment manager and Aviva Investors’ first move into tokenized fund structures, as The Block reported at the time.

The dollar class followed on 29 July, a tokenized share class of the Aviva Investors USD Liquidity Fund, launched after the Central Bank of Ireland approved it, as Cointelegraph reported the next day. Monday’s sterling class is the third step. Versey called it “our second fund in the tokenisation space”, and The Block reported that the firm plans to explore further tokenization with Ripple.

The timing suits Ripple, whose Swell conference opens in New York the next day.

Aviva’s tokenized fund on the XRP Ledger beside BUIDL, BENJI and JLTXX

Tokenized US Treasury and money market products held $14.65 billion of distributed value on 26 October, across 120 assets and 85,924 holders, according to rwa.xyz. The tracker also shows $90.30 million of “represented” value, a separate bucket, and a 7-day average yield of 3.64%. The largest platforms were Ondo ($3.0 billion), Franklin Templeton’s Benji ($2.7 billion), Circle ($2.4 billion), Securitize ($2.3 billion) and J.P. Morgan’s Kinexys ($892.3 million).

These are rwa.xyz figures read on 26 October. They change daily, and other trackers count some products differently. The Aviva dollar token is counted as represented value, not distributed value, which in our reading fits the Ledger Insights description of tokens that mirror a register and do not move between holders.

Access is narrow everywhere. J.P. Morgan’s two tokenized funds, which moved to Solana last week, are open only to qualified US investors with $1 million. BlackRock’s BUIDL runs through Securitize, the transfer agent behind the fund. Aviva’s difference is its currency: a sterling money fund, not a dollar Treasury fund. The rwa.xyz page we read showed about 25 of its 120 products, none of them in sterling, so we do not claim Aviva’s is the first sterling one, only that the large products on the list are dollar funds.

For readers new to the idea, a tokenized fund keeps its assets and legal structure where they were and adds a record of who owns the shares on a blockchain. Our guide to what blockchains are used for beyond crypto puts this kind of record-keeping next to the other real-world uses.

An Irish UCITS in sterling, and where the FCA stands

Aviva is a British group and the class is in sterling, but the fund is Irish. The release calls it an Ireland-domiciled UCITS money market fund, the EU’s harmonised fund format. Irish UCITS answer to the Central Bank of Ireland, which approved the dollar class’s tokens in July; no approval has been announced for the sterling class. UCITS funds can be passported across the Union, and French and Italian institutions already use UCITS money market funds for their cash, so the product family is familiar even if this class is new.

No source says the token class is marketed in France or Italy, and we found no statement from the AMF, Consob or the Banca d’Italia about it. For retail readers in Paris or Milan it changes nothing today: the class is for eligible investors with digital wallets, and the dollar version came with a seven-figure minimum.

In the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority published Policy Statement PS26/7, “Progressing Fund Tokenisation”, on 30 April 2026. According to a summary published on Regulation Tomorrow, its tokenisation guidance lets UK-authorised funds treat an on-chain record of unit deals as their primary books and records, and it adds a “direct to fund” dealing model. That guidance covers UK-authorised funds, so it does not govern this Irish fund. It does show which way London is heading. The FCA and the Bank of England also opened a joint call for input on tokenised wholesale markets on 18 May, with responses due by 3 July, The Block reported. We found no published feedback statement since.

What it means for XRP

The fund does not hold XRP. It holds short-term sterling debt, and the XRP Ledger is only the record of who owns the token class, a point crypto.news also made. Owning a fund share recorded on the ledger is not the same as owning the ledger’s coin.

XRP was near $1.29 around 11:45 UTC on Monday, little changed on the day, and none of the sources we read tied a price move to the news. According to rwa.xyz figures cited by Cointelegraph, the XRP Ledger is the ninth-largest chain for tokenized assets, with $642 million of distributed value and about 2,900 holders.

What to watch after the launch

What would make the launch measurable is public data: an issuing address on the ledger, a factsheet or prospectus supplement with the minimum and the transfer rules, and the class showing up on rwa.xyz with more than Aviva’s own £50 million in it. The first outside subscriber, if Aviva names one, would say more than the seed money does.

The next date is Ripple’s Swell conference in New York, from 27 to 29 October. Versey said Aviva wants to keep exploring tokenisation with Ripple, so any next fund could surface there.