A new breed of money-market fund has arrived on Wall Street.
This week, U.S. regulators gave WisdomTree Inc. so-called exemptive relief to trade tokenized shares of its money-market mutual fund intraday, in what the asset manager says is a first-of-its-kind approval that could re-jig the plumbing of cash management.
The green light from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission allows investors to buy and sell shares in the $730 million WisdomTree Treasury Money Market Digital Fund at a constant $1 throughout the day, regardless of its end-of-day net asset value. Trading will start next week and can take place around the clock with instant settlement on blockchain rails.
Under the traditional mutual fund model, investors can buy and sell only once daily at the NAV. The new structure breaks that constraint, enabling 24/7 trading through a broker-dealer acting as principal.
In effect, a typically staid corner of the cash market is getting a digital overhaul.
"We talk about instant settlement but that hasn't happened before this relief," Will Peck, head of digital assets at WisdomTree, said in an interview. "This opens up a lot of opportunities for Treasury management, collateral mobility, and instant payment" particularly with the stablecoin community.
Peck expects the fund — ticker WGTXX — to become one of the firm's largest, potentially rivaling the $16 billion WisdomTree Floating Rate Treasury Fund (USFR).
"If you want to sell shares at 2 a.m. on a Sunday, you can," Peck added.
Tokenization involves turning conventional assets — stocks, bonds or private loans — into blockchain-based tokens that confer fractional ownership. It's become one of the hottest trends as Wall Street continues to court crypto-native capital.
The broader tokenized real-world asset market is about $25 billion, according to data-provider rwa.xyz, a fraction of the trillions in mutual funds and ETFs.
Whether the model scales beyond a single exemption depends on questions the approval leaves open: how liquidity holds during periods of market stress, which market players will make off-hours markets, and whether the agency extends similar relief to larger issuers — or codifies the framework through formal rulemaking.
James Seyffart, an ETF analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said for now the approval matters less for what it does today than for what it proves is possible. Instant settlement of a money-market fund is a proof of concept, he said — in the near term, it simply lets investors enter and exit the fund instantaneously.
Broader Implications
But the broader implications are significant: eliminating settlement risk and counterparty exposure that come with waiting a day or two for trades to clear, and ultimately enabling greater capital efficiency and better collateral optimization.
There are tradeoffs, Seyffart noted, including the loss of netting at clearinghouses. But if instant settlement works for money markets and Treasurys, the implications for the broader plumbing of trading and capital movement could be substantial.
WisdomTree began considering tokenizing the money-market fund back in July 2024, according to Peck, who credited a more open stance from the SEC under President Donald Trump for getting the approval. The company is also looking at tokenizing exchange-traded funds.
"The current SEC has been very constructive in speaking with businesses," he said. "We found the agency willing to engage and consider consumer-friendly products."
Copyright 2026 Bloomberg. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.