Former senior employees at the Gemini crypto exchange made the announcement that OpenEden, a DeFi platform, had established the first smart contract vault to allow access to Tokenized United States Treasury Notes (T-Bills). OpenEden is a competitor to Gemini.
The release states that OpenEden will make it possible for holders of stablecoins to mint Treasury Bills (T-BILL) tokens using the OpenEden T-BILL Vaul. Because of this, users of OpenEden can earn a risk-free rate in the United States, with returns of around 4.8 percent per year beginning in March 2023.
Significantly, Jeremy Ng and Eugene Ng, who are both co-founders of OpenEden, previously worked for Gemini, respectively, as the former head of Asia Pacific operations and the former head of corporate development for the area.
OpenEden is supported by a number of institutional investors, some of which are KPMG, Elliptic, DBS, Chainlink, and Harneys. Circle, which is the issuer of USDC, is also one of those investors.
According to OpenEden, TBILL tokens adhere to the ERC-20 specifications and are able to be moved freely across various blockchain wallets because they are based on Ethereum.
According to what Jeremy remarked (1), “From the very beginning, we sought to create the opposite of a ‘trust me bro’ product for DAO treasuries, Web3 institutions, and cryptocurrency funds.” There are stablecoins with a market value of almost $130 billion currently just sitting there and not producing any meaningful yield.
As the yields on digital currencies continue to fall farther behind those on traditional financial assets, there is an increasing desire for institutional-grade digital currency solutions that offer stablecoin holders low-risk, liquid, and transparent rewards.
Eugene, who works for OpenEden, echoed these thoughts when he said that the company had spent the previous year concentrating on the development of institutional-grade regulated DeFi solutions.
In addition, the OpenEden protocol uses the Chainlink network, which links oracles based in the real world to participants in the blockchain sector.
“The OpenEden TBILL Vault not only enables on-chain entry to US Treasury yields but it is also incorporated with a Chainlink Proof-of-Reserves and provides real-time clarity into the underlying securities of TBILL tokens,” Eugene explained further. “This allows for real-time visibility into the assets that TBILL tokens are backed by.”
Eden in Public Domain
OpenEden was established earlier in 2022 by a group of individuals who have decades of experience working in institutional finance and technology.
These individuals have previously held positions at Gemini, Goldman Sachs Group Inc (NYSE: GS), Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS), Deutsche Bank AG (Xetra: DBK), Barclays PLC, BlockFi, Bybit, and Binance.
Interestingly, Hill Lights International Ltd., the company responsible for issuing TBILL tokens, is a professional fund founded in accordance with the British Virgin Islands Securities & Investment Business Act 2010.
OpenEden Pte Ltd, on the other hand, is a Registered Fund Management Firm under the Monetary Authority of Singapore. OpenEden Pte Ltd is the investment adviser of the OpenEden TBILL Vault.
OpenEden’s goal in tokenizing real-world assets is to open up the blockchain sector to a $300 trillion marketplace that has not yet been exploited on a worldwide basis. This market is now untapped.
In addition, despite only being around for the past 14 years, the cryptocurrency market is estimated to be worth approximately one trillion dollars.
After gaining value during the Covid epidemic as well as the banking crisis, however, the industry has established a reputation on a global scale that is superior to that of regular stock markets.