Andrew Crosses the Divide
Invesco takes the investment manager seat on Superstate’s USTB — and in doing so, bets that DeFi’s past is TradFi’s future.
Editor’s Note: Robert Leshner built Compound, the DeFi lending protocol that put the yield-farming craze on the map and sent compliance officers at firms like Invesco reaching for the antacids. Until recently, his name was krypto — and by that we mean kryptonite, not cryptography — to TradFi execs like Andrew Schlossberg. The Invesco deal with Superstate says that era is over. More importantly, it says Andrew sees what’s coming for his own flagship product.
Andrew Schlossberg is putting Invesco’s $2.2 trillion AUM name behind Superstate’s USTB — the $967 million tokenized Treasury fund that Robert Leshner built to prove to Wall Street the RWA concept works. In the Gensler era, fund firms fled from moves like this; in the Atkins era, we will see more follow Schlossberg’s lead.
Under the deal, Invesco’s global liquidity team, led by chief investment officer Laurie Brignac, takes over as investment manager of USTB. The fund gets a new name — Invesco Short Duration US Government Securities Fund — keeps its USTB ticker, and transitions in Q2 2026. Invesco’s Kathleen Wrynn, global head of digital assets, drove the partnership.
USTB carries real weight. It has processed billions of dollars in transactions for more than 150 institutional investors and ranks fourth globally among tokenized real-world asset funds. Leshner built the fund right — the problem was getting shareholders through the door. Compliance officers at large asset managers, CIOs at RIAs, and those building the models at wirehouses don’t know his name. Schlossberg gives them one they do.
“Invesco has been strategically building the capabilities required to support institutional-grade digital asset products since 2019, and this partnership reflects that long-term commitment,” Wrynn said.
The Wrynn hire itself is a tell. She ran the DLT business at JPMorgan — specifically Kinexys, the rebranded Onyx platform, the most mature institutional blockchain deployment on the Street. Before that: DWS Group and Deutsche Bank. Schlossberg didn’t hire a crypto person. She is not the only JPMorgan blockchain alum now running digital assets at a major institution — Christine Moy left the same shop to lead digital assets at Apollo. Jamie Dimon’s team is the farm team for the current free agent pool that Schlossberg and other savvy TradFi leaders are fishing in.
The backstory matters. Leshner co-founded Compound in 2017 and built one of the first DeFi protocols — a lending market that, at its peak, held billions in user funds governed by a token that anyone could trade. That track record would have killed a deal like this cold 12 months ago. Schlossberg shaking Leshner’s hand is the signal. It tells the industry the wall between DeFi-native founders and TradFi asset managers is coming down.
Superstate’s infrastructure makes the handshake easier. Leshner registered Superstate Services as an SEC-registered transfer agent in March 2025 — meaning Invesco is not building on rogue DeFi rails but on SEC-blessed ones. The compliance officers Schlossberg is giving cover to can point to the registration.
Schlossberg telegraphed this move ten months ago. At the ICI Leadership Summit in May 2025, he told the room of mutual fund honchos that tokenization “is way bigger than digital assets” — that it is “another angle on how we’re going to be able to democratize parts of private markets” and cut “the costs that we all bear and our clients bear.” Infrastructure, not product.
“Rather than fighting the tape,” he said, “everybody coming together to do it is going to make this a lot more successful.”
Robert Sharps, CEO of T. Rowe Price, sat beside him in front of the gathered fund leaders and played the role of the wizened TradFi skeptic, offering counterpoint with sharp precision.
“Much of what you’ve seen so far is largely commoditized,” Sharps said. “Spot Bitcoin exposure — I’m not sure we can offer something differentiated in that realm.” His question for the space: “What role should digital assets play in a multi-asset portfolio, or is there an underlying building block that is unique and differentiated?”
The USTB deal is Schlossberg’s parry. It is also, quietly, a sharper version of Sharps’ question thrust back at him.
The competitive read is not subtle. BlackRock’s BUIDL, powered by Securitize, is the largest tokenized RWA fund on the market. Larry Fink moved first and loudest. Schlossberg is making the same calculation Fink made — that the infrastructure question is settled enough to put a flagship liquidity franchise on the line.
Also worth watching is Fidelity. Cynthia Lo Bessette, who heads digital asset management at the Boston Behemoth, was publicly bullish on tokenized Treasuries when she took the Ondo Summit stage in February. That is not a surprise: Fidelity partnered with Ondo on its own tokenized money market fund last September.
But there is a second angle here that few in the trades have connected yet.
On March 18, the SEC approved Nasdaq’s rule change allowing ETFs tracking the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 to trade in tokenized form through the DTCC’s pilot program. Invesco is the sponsor of the PowerShares family of ETFs, including QQQ — the famed Nasdaq-100 fund. NYSE announced its own tokenized securities platform in January, partnering with Securitize for 24/7 onchain trading of equities and ETFs. Nasdaq is also planning to offer tokenized ETF shares. The wave is not on the horizon — it is about to break.
Schlossberg’s move gets Invesco’s team in position to catch it and surf a gnarly ride. Working inside Superstate’s digital transfer agent infrastructure is not just a product launch. It is on-the-job training for the team that will eventually manage tokenized QQQ.
This is also not Invesco’s first tokenization deal — it’s the second. In February 2025, Wrynn’s team partnered with DigiFT in Singapore to tokenize a $6.3 billion private credit fund. Start where the regulation is friendlier, build the muscle, then bring it home when the Atkins window opens. USTB is step two in a sequence, not a one-off.
Invesco has been patiently scouting the tides. In November 2024, the firm co-authored a report with Boston Consulting Group and Aptos Labs calling tokenized funds “the third revolution in asset management” — after mutual funds and ETFs — and projecting the category could reach $600 billion in AUM by 2030. The USTB deal is the firm putting money behind its own thesis.
The Invesco-Superstate deal makes just as much sense from the other side of the table. The fund business is a distribution business — advisor relationships, institutional sales teams, brand recognition on a compliance-approved list. Leshner has none of that. Today he is focused on building Opening Bell infrastructure for the tokenizers.
Mike Novogratz’ Galaxy Digital tokenized its GLXY shares through Superstate’s Opening Bell platform last September — the first public company to issue SEC-registered equity directly on a blockchain.
So, rather than strengthening a weakness, Leshner is building on a strength. The USTB deal offloads a problem — running a fund against firms with trillion-dollar brands and decades of institutional relationships — and creates a customer for his rails, all in one move. Leshner is not exiting the tokenized fund business. Every TradFi firm that wants to tokenize a product is now a potential Superstate client, not a competitor.
Leshner knows he is not the only one building rails. Mike Cagney’s Figure Technologies launched its own competing network — OPEN, running on Provenance Blockchain — and debuted tokenized FGRD shares in a $150-million secondary offering earlier this year. Two DeFi-rooted founders, two SEC-registered platforms, both racing to become the plumbing TradFi builds on. The Mike v. Mike battle for tokenized equity infrastructure is one to watch.
Schlossberg likely sees infrastructure training for his team and a fund he can sell. Leshner sees a distribution problem solved and a platform business born.
Kathleen Wrynn, global head of digital assets, Invesco.
Source: Invesco / Superstate press release
Related Coverage:
Invesco takes over Superstate’s $900 million T-bill fund as Wall Street accelerates tokenization push — March 24, 2026
Invesco Hires Crypto Product Leader from JPMorgan — June 16, 2025
Invesco partners DigiFT for tokenized private credit fund — February 18, 2025
Related on CeFiWire:
Compound’s Leshner Joins the World of Mutual Funds, Takes on Franklin Templeton — July 5, 2023
The World Turned Upside Down — September 7, 2025