F/m Investments has filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to record ownership of tokenised shares in its US Treasury 3-month bill ETF — ticker TBIL — on a permissioned blockchain, in a move that would make it one of the first tokenised registered ETFs in the United States if approved.
According to Reuters, the filing proposes that tokenised TBIL shares carry the same CUSIP identifier and investor rights as conventional shares — maintaining full regulatory parity between on-chain and off-chain share classes rather than creating a separate tokenised product with different terms. The permissioned blockchain approach addresses institutional compliance requirements around investor identity and transfer restrictions.
The filing is significant as a regulatory test case. Unlike tokenised fund products that have launched under private placement exemptions — including BlackRock BUIDL and JPMorgan MONY — a tokenised registered ETF would be accessible to a much broader investor base including retail investors, making SEC approval a substantially higher regulatory bar and a correspondingly larger market opportunity if granted.
The SEC's formal statement on tokenised securities issued one week later — clarifying that tokenisation does not change a security's legal status — provides relevant framework context for the TBIL filing, though approval remains subject to the full SEC review process.