OpenEden Teams Up With BNY Mellon for Tokenized Treasury Fund
OpenEden, a platform that tokenizes real-world assets, just signed a deal with BNY Mellon—one of the oldest and biggest names in banking. The partnership, announced Wednesday, means BNY Mellon will now handle custody and management for OpenEden’s flagship product, TBILL, a tokenized U.S. Treasury fund.
What’s interesting here is that TBILL isn’t just another crypto experiment. It’s the first tokenized Treasury fund with an “A” rating from Moody’s to be backed by a major global custodian. That rating matters—it means the underlying assets are considered solid, low-risk, and likely to hold their value. In other words, it’s about as safe as traditional finance gets.
Jeremy Ng, OpenEden’s CEO, mentioned that working with BNY Mellon brings “deep fiduciary expertise” to the table. Translation? They’re trying to make digital assets feel a little less wild and a little more trustworthy.
Why Tokenized Treasurys Are Gaining Traction
OpenEden says demand for TBILL has been growing, though they didn’t share exact numbers. The product, launched last year, lets investors buy into a pool of short-term U.S. Treasury Bills and similar assets by minting TBILL tokens. Each token represents a slice of that portfolio, including any yield it generates.
It’s not exactly revolutionary—plenty of firms are playing with tokenized Treasurys these days—but the involvement of a heavyweight like BNY Mellon adds credibility. Their investment arm, Dreyfus, will act as a sub-manager for the fund, while BNY itself takes care of custody.
Jose Minaya, BNY Mellon’s global head of investments, called the bank a “bridge” between old-school finance and new tech. He hinted that this partnership is just the start—they’re looking at ways to handle tokenized assets from creation to settlement.
BNY Mellon’s Slow but Steady Crypto Push
BNY Mellon hasn’t been rushing into crypto. Back in 2022, they started offering custody for Bitcoin and Ether, mostly for institutional clients. Since then, they’ve inched forward, launching tools for tracking onchain data and even teaming up with Goldman Sachs on a tokenized money market fund project.
That last one, announced in July, could eventually give investors round-the-clock access to money markets—something that’s still rare in traditional finance.
None of this means BNY Mellon is going all-in on crypto tomorrow. But it does suggest they’re paying attention, dipping toes in carefully. For OpenEden, that’s probably the point. Partnering with a 240-year-old bank doesn’t just add security—it sends a signal that tokenization isn’t just for crypto true believers anymore.
Whether that’s enough to win over skeptics is another question. But for now, it’s one more step toward making blockchain-based finance feel, well, normal.
