VBILL

VBILL: VanEck's first tokenized fund at 20bps. VBILL is VanEck Treasury Fund, Ltd. — a British Virgin Islands-domiciled private fund tokenized through Securitize and issued to Qualified Purchasers under Regulation D. The portfolio holds US Treasury bills, cash, and Treasury-collateralized repurchase agreements; the target NAV is a permanent $1.00 per token, with accrued yield distributed as newly-minted tokens each day. Custodian is The Bank of New York Mellon. Current 7-day APY: 3.45%Source: RWA.xyz (7-day annualized yield) gross, ~3.25% net of the 20bps management fee. Other attributes:

• Multi-chain native from launch. Deployed simultaneously on Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain, and Avalanche in May'25. Cross-chain transfers use Wormhole's Native Token Transfers standard — burn-and-mint, no wrapped representations — so the whitelist-compliance layer remains intact across chains. Current Ethereum supply ~$32MSource: on-chain VBILL.totalSupply().
• Four redemption surfaces, not one. Primary-market USDC via Securitize; atomic Agora AUSD swap on-chain; Ripple RLUSD smart-contract swap (partnership announced Sep'25); and institutional collateral on Aave Horizon (added Nov'25, priced via Chainlink NAVLink). Exit options exceed BUIDL's primary-market-only design through 2024.
• Securitize operates the full stack. Transfer agent, fund administrator, broker-dealer (Securitize Markets, LLC, SEC-registered), and ATS secondary market all run by Securitize. This concentrates operational risk on one vendor but means VBILL inherits the production track record that Securitize has built running BUIDL.
• Rating: Med Risk. The portfolio, custody, and service-provider stack are institutional-grade. What keeps the rating at Med rather than Low: scale. Total AUM ~$68M across 28 holders after 11 months is 3% of BUIDL's footprint. No VBILL-specific stress precedent. Wormhole's NTT cross-chain architecture is distinct from the 2022 bridge exploit but still operates on the Guardian validator set. Auditor identity for the fund itself is not publicly disclosed.

Where it fits. VBILL targets the institutional-Qualified-Purchaser tier — the same segment as BUIDL — at a lower minimum ($100K on L2s, $1M on Ethereum vs BUIDL's $5M) and a cheaper fee (20bps vs BUIDL's 20-50bps tiered schedule). Its distinguishing edges are the four-chain simultaneous launch, the three-way stablecoin off-ramp architecture (USDC / AUSD / RLUSD), and Aave Horizon collateral eligibility. What VBILL cannot offer that USDY or BENJI can is a broader eligibility pool — the QP-only gate caps the TAM at a smaller investor segment than Reg S or 40-Act peers can access.

Portfolio mandate. The fund holds only US government-backed instruments: Treasury bills, cash, and repurchase agreements collateralized by US Treasury obligations. Weighted-average maturity is capped at 60 days, dollar-weighted average life is capped at 120 days, and no individual security may have a maturity longer than 397 days. These are money-market-fund-equivalent parameters — VBILL is not a registered 40-Act money market fund, but the portfolio discipline mirrors Rule 2a-7 practice. No corporate credit exposure, no agency paper, no non-US sovereign holdings.

Custody. Fund assets are custodied at The Bank of New York Mellon (~$55T global assets under custody). Custody is off-chain through standard institutional account structures. Token ownership is a digital representation of the underlying book-entry position, not a claim on a separate on-chain reserve — the legal security is the fund share, which Securitize tokenizes.

Distributing-NAV mechanic. VBILL maintains a permanent $1.00 NAV target. Accrued yield is paid to holder wallets by minting new VBILL tokens each day — wallets see their token count grow, not their price per token. This matches BUIDL's rebasing-supply design and differs structurally from USTB's accumulating-NAV model (where NAV grows from $10.00 → $11.05 while share count stays constant). Integrators who render VBILL balances should display tokens as dollars 1:1; any system that assumes stable share count over time will misrepresent the holder position.

7-day APY sits at ~3.45%, tracking the short end of the Treasury curve. Net yield to investors is the portfolio yield minus the 20bps management fee. Because VBILL distributes daily in-kind via token-mint, the practical return is captured as supply growth rather than NAV appreciation — a wallet holding 1,000,000 VBILL on day 1 will hold ~1,000,095 VBILL 30 days later at ~3.45% gross yield, assuming no subscriptions or redemptions.

Subscription. An approved investor sends USDC to the Securitize platform. Securitize mints VBILL tokens 1:1 and delivers them to the investor's whitelisted wallet. In the underlying fund structure, Securitize aggregates incoming subscriptions and routes to the T-bill portfolio held at BNY Mellon. NAV strike happens daily via RedStone. Minimum subscription is $1,000,000 on Ethereum and $100,000 on Solana, BNB Chain, and Avalanche.

Redemption — three on-chain paths plus primary market. (1) Securitize primary market: submit a redemption request, VBILL burns, USDC settles back to the investor. (2) Agora AUSD atomic swap: single on-chain transaction exchanges VBILL for AUSD stablecoin against Agora's liquidity, 24/7. (3) Ripple RLUSD smart-contract swap: 24/7 atomic exchange of VBILL for RLUSD, announced September 2025 as part of the Ripple / Securitize partnership that also covers BUIDL. (4) Aave Horizon: pledge VBILL as collateral and borrow stablecoins against it, preserving the underlying yield position while unlocking working capital.

Daily in-kind distribution. The portfolio earns yield on its T-bill and repo holdings at short-Treasury rates. VanEck accrues this yield daily net of the 20bps management fee and pays it to holders by minting new VBILL tokens pro-rata at the $1.00 NAV. This is the same mechanism BUIDL uses and differs from USTB (NAV appreciation) and BENJI (intra-day money-market-fund share pricing). For integrators: VBILL is always $1.00 per token; yield is captured as token-count growth over time.

Two oracle layers, different consumers. Daily NAV strike for primary-market subscription and redemption runs through RedStone, which publishes a NAV price on each chain. A second oracle layer — Chainlink NAVLink — provides DeFi-consumption pricing specifically for Aave Horizon, where VBILL is accepted as institutional collateral. The separation is intentional: primary-market activity flows through Securitize's chosen oracle (RedStone), while downstream lending collateral uses Chainlink's aggregated NAV feed as a safer cross-check. Securitize has also indicated plans to integrate its own Trusted Single Source Oracle (TSSO) as an additional layer.

Native Token Transfers, not wrapped assets. VBILL is deployed natively on four chains. Cross-chain transfers use Wormhole's NTT standard — the token burns on the origin chain and the equivalent amount mints on the destination chain, with the Guardian validator set attesting the burn. There is no wrapped representation and no bridge-issued derivative; the minted tokens on the destination chain are the same whitelist-governed security. This matters for regulatory compliance: the Securitize transfer restrictions follow VBILL across chains rather than terminating at the bridge.

Wormhole carries prior exploit history — the February 2022 Solana bridge incident drained $320M before the bridge was patched and investors made whole. The NTT standard is architecturally distinct from the 2022 wrapped-asset bridge design, but it sits on top of Wormhole's Guardian multisig. Per-chain supply caps on VBILL are enforced by the Securitize token contracts themselves rather than by Wormhole configuration, which constrains the blast radius of any bridge-level failure.

Qualified Purchasers only. VBILL is restricted to Qualified Purchasers — the higher eligibility bar under the Investment Company Act. For individuals this means ≥$5M of invested assets; for entities, ≥$25M. Approval routes through Securitize's KYC/AML onboarding, which maps a verified legal identity to an on-chain wallet address. Once approved, the investor's wallet enters the transfer whitelist and can send/receive VBILL within the Securitize-managed address set.

No retail path. Unlike BENJI (Franklin, Reg S + 40-Act registered) or USDY (Ondo, non-US accredited), VBILL has no structural pathway to accredited-investor or retail capital. This is an intentional design — the fund optimizes for institutional capital-management use cases and partnerships like Aave Horizon. The trade-off is a structurally smaller TAM than retail-accessible peers.

We rate VBILL as Med Risk. The portfolio, custody, and service-provider stack are institutional-grade and materially indistinguishable from BUIDL on quality. What keeps the rating at Med rather than Low is scale and track record: $68M AUM across 28 holders after 11 months indicates limited organic demand, and there is no VBILL-specific stress precedent to draw on. We expect the rating to compress toward Low as AUM crosses $250M and holder concentration diversifies.

VBILL competes in the institutional-grade tokenized US Treasury segment. Peer set below (AUM, yield, fees as of April 2026; source RWA.xyz live data).

Where VBILL wins. Cheaper than BUIDL's high-tier fee. More chains than USTB (4 vs 3). BNY Mellon custody parity with BlackRock-class peers. Aave Horizon collateral eligibility shared only with BUIDL in this peer group. Daily-mint distribution matches BUIDL for integrators expecting that mechanic. Wormhole NTT-native cross-chain design is the cleanest in the category for preserving whitelist compliance across chains.

Where VBILL loses. Scale. At $68M, VBILL is ~35x smaller than BUIDL and ~10x smaller than USTB. Holder base is narrow even by QP-only standards. BENJI and USDY access broader retail-or-accredited pools that VBILL's structure cannot reach. Unless VanEck launches a companion Reg S product, VBILL's ceiling is the QP-only tier — structurally smaller TAM than USDY's accredited-investor pool or BENJI's retail-accessible structure.

Likely trajectory. Institutional adoption driven by Aave Horizon (convert VBILL to USDC working capital without redeeming), plus ongoing Securitize onboarding. We expect $250–500M AUM within 12–18 months as Aave Horizon's permissioned lender base grows. VBILL is unlikely to reach BUIDL scale without a structural eligibility expansion.

VBILL's on-chain holder base is highly concentrated, consistent with a Qualified-Purchaser-only offering at an early stage. RWA.xyz's chain-level breakdown: Ethereum 14 holders / ~$32M, BNB 3 holders / ~$22M, Solana 8 holders / ~$14M, Avalanche 3 holders / ~$0.7M. Top-10 concentration on Ethereum approaches 100% of chain supply because there are only 14 holder addresses total. The table below fetches Ethereum-chain holders live from Ethplorer.

What the concentration tells us. With 28 total holders across all chains, VBILL is effectively a private placement operating on public rails — a feature, not a bug, at the QP-only eligibility bar. Compare to USDY (Ondo) at 13,906 holders or BENJI (Franklin) at 1,085, both of which target more retail-accessible pools via Reg S or 40-Act structures. VBILL's peer group is BUIDL (101 holders) — the institutional-only tier. We expect VBILL's holder count to triple before stabilizing as Securitize onboards additional QP-verified institutional clients.

In November 2025, VBILL was added to Aave Horizon — the permissioned RWA market where institutions can borrow stablecoins against tokenized fund collateral. Horizon gates both collateral supplies and borrower access behind KYC; this is not open-DeFi usage. Pricing runs through Chainlink NAVLink with LlamaGuard as a secondary NAV source. Aave Horizon reached $460M+ in deposits at the VBILL addition announcement, giving VBILL holders a route to convert sub-account exposure into working USDC liquidity without redeeming the underlying position.

Agora's AUSD stablecoin integrates with VBILL as a 24/7 atomic redemption path. A single on-chain transaction exchanges VBILL tokens for AUSD against Agora's liquidity pool. This provides 24/7 exit independent of banking hours, constrained only by Agora's available inventory. AUSD is a newer stablecoin with smaller float than USDC; large exits would test Agora's balance sheet.

The Ripple / Securitize partnership (September 2025) created a 24/7 smart-contract swap path between VBILL and RLUSD. Same pattern as the Agora integration but against Ripple's stablecoin. RLUSD launched in 2024 and has grown through 2025; its liquidity profile is maturing but still smaller than USDC.

Wormhole is the official cross-chain interoperability provider for VBILL. The NTT standard preserves whitelist compliance across all four chain deployments. Per-chain supply caps are enforced by the Securitize contracts themselves.

Launch release: PR Newswire · May'25 · live data: RWA.xyz · LEI: 254900DAPDXM9GX8YR72 · Wormhole NTT: partnership · Aave Horizon: integration post · Ripple RLUSD: Sep'25 announcement. CUSIPs, auditor identity, and detailed portfolio composition live in the PPM, which is not publicly distributed; verify at onboarding.