A major US asset management firm recently submitted an interesting application to regulators—aiming to move some of its approximately $6.3 billion government bond ETF (ticker: TBIL, which invests in 3-month US Treasury bonds) onto the blockchain.

It sounds like a major overhaul, but it’s not. The company explicitly stated that the product structure, investment targets, and trading methods remain unchanged; only the registration records of the holders are being introduced onto the blockchain. In other words, it’s a technical experiment based on the existing framework.

The real purpose behind this is clear: to test whether securities tokenization can work effectively within a regulated environment. Such innovations have been widely discussed, but there are few cases actually advancing within a compliant framework. This company, founded in 2018 and a veteran in the asset management field, is essentially using real capital to verify a market hypothesis—whether blockchain technology can truly integrate into the traditional financial settlement system.

If this experiment succeeds, it could mean that more traditional financial products may follow the path of tokenization in the future.