Libre is working closely with hedge fund Brevan Howard, investment management company Hamilton Lane, and Nomura’s Digital Assets Unit Laser Digital, and will tokenize telegram debt worth $500 million as a blockchain-based Telegram Bond Fund (TBF) in the Ton network linked to the Messaging platform.
The TBF will be exposed to investors accredited as part of the roughly $2.4 billion outstanding debt issued by Telegram and will also provide institutional-grade yield products that can also be used as collateral for chain borrowings and product developments at Ton, Libre said.
“What we created is something like a bond fund that gets bonds, then tokenize the fund,” Libre CEO Avtar Sehra in an interview. “When you buy units in a fund, these are in the ton chain and you have access to the returns of the underlying bonds themselves. This opens up opportunities to use bonds to ultimately create utilities on these financial instruments, ease of transfer, and more.”
The past year or two saw the rush to create blockchain-based representations of real-world assets (RWAS), bringing the traditional world of finance quickly within the scope of crypto and distributed finance (DEFI).
Sehra said many customers want tokenized money market products because they are looking for quick access to cash or for things related to or working within the ecosystem they are involved in.
The TON network was originally developed by Telegram before continuing as an independent operation. Over the last year or so, Ton has focused on offering a large user base of over 950 million users on Telegram on-chain.
Libre has already tokenized more than $200 million in assets across funding from major institutions such as BlackRock, Brevan Howard, Hamilton Lane and Laser Digital.
“Our aim is not just tokenize things tokenize,” Sara said. “I think the real value in tokenization of traditional financial instruments is to unlock the usefulness of those assets.”