VanEck’s tokenized U.S. Treasury fund, VBILL, has gone live on the Euler lending platform. Securitize, which issues the fund and provides its tokenization infrastructure, announced on Thursday that the product is now available across Euler’s lending markets.
Investors can now use tokenized Treasury bills as on-chain collateral to borrow and deploy liquidity elsewhere. Compliance restrictions remain in place throughout the process.
The tokenized Treasury market has gained strong momentum in recent months. According to RWA.xyz data, total assets in this segment have surpassed $15 billion, marking growth of around 150% over the past year. Major asset managers such as BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and Janus Henderson have already launched Treasury and money market products for institutional investors seeking on-chain yield.
So how large can this market become? Standard Chartered expects tokenized assets to reach $2 trillion by 2028. A joint projection from BCG and Ripple points to $18.9 trillion by 2033.
DeFi Protocols Open the Door to Institutional Capital
Euler initially operated as a fully permissionless lending protocol. Earlier this year, the platform began shifting toward institutional use cases. Euler, which currently holds more than $320 million in assets, has integrated Securitize’s DS Protocol into its system. This integration allows tokenized securities to interact with lending markets while preserving investor eligibility requirements and transfer restrictions. Price data for VBILL is provided through RedStone oracles.
Rival platform Aave has followed a similar path. Aave launched Horizon, a real-world asset platform focused on institutional borrowers and tokenized collateral.
Graham Ferguson, head of ecosystem at Securitize, commented on the development: “There are now protocols that are eager to integrate permissioned assets. That wasn’t really the case before.”
According to Ferguson, the main issue is balancing crypto’s open infrastructure with the compliance expectations of traditional financial institutions. As serious institutional investors enter the space, they need certain protection and permission structures they are already familiar with. “DeFi protocols are finally realizing that if they want to attract this capital, they need to change the way they operate,” Ferguson said.
The Structure Is Changing
The VBILL-Euler integration is part of a broader trend in which DeFi protocols originally designed for permissionless crypto assets are making architectural adjustments to open the door to the institutional world. For institutional investors seeking yield-bearing on-chain collateral, tokenized Treasury bills have become an attractive option. Yet this interest is also forcing DeFi to confront a fundamental tension: openness or compliance?
For now, platforms such as Euler and Aave appear to be answering that question with both. They are reshaping their infrastructure to support permissioned assets, but how this will affect protocol architecture and the principle of decentralization in the long run remains unclear.
In contrast to the VanEck development, the EUL price is declining. Bitcoin fell below $73,000 in the early hours of the morning, starting the day under pressure. Most altcoins were also affected by this move. EUL lost 10.27% in the past 24 hours and traded in the $1.14–$1.35 range. Despite the positive atmosphere created by the news, the token could not escape the broader market pressure.
