Robert Leshner's Superstate introduces real-time 'continuous pricing' for USTB tokenized Treasurys fund

Tokenization firm Superstate is upgrading its USTB fund tracking U.S. government securities by introducing “continuous pricing,” a first-of-its-kind feature that dynamically updates the fund's net asset value.

With this introduction, USTB holders will now experience instant interest accrual, eliminating the lag typically associated with traditional market settlement cycles. This means investors benefit from returns starting the moment they invest rather than waiting for the next business day's NAV update. 

USTB has just over $145 million in assets under management and currently pays a yield of 4.80% over a seven-day period. Ownership in the fund is represented by an ERC-20 token, USTB.

"This is the first time we are spending time talking about and upgrading the TradFi side of what we do,” Superstate founder Robert Leshner told The Block in an interview. "What if the TradFi side of a tokenized fund actually inherited a lot of the logic and principles from the blockchain side to make the TradFi side better?"

Leshner said the continuous pricing also lays the groundwork for future product enhancements at Superstate, including atomic minting and redemptions and enabling near-instantaneous conversions between USTB and USDC.

"The really powerful second-order effect is actually not as obvious, which is it's going to make DeFi composability dramatically go up,” Leshner said. “Switching to real-time pricing under the hood is going to enable us to do real-time pricing onchain. Once you can do that, then suddenly DeFi protocols can integrate T-bills as their back-end with so much more efficiency.”

For now, the service is likely limited to T-bills, which pay out predictable returns, rather than other tokenized assets that can fluctuate wildly, Leshner said. Without going into specifics, Leshner said Superstate will interpolate data based on the portfolio's yield over specific time intervals (e.g., every hour). 

“This is not a methodology that would necessarily translate to other funds that we've created,” Leshner said. “We have a second cash and carry basis trading fund which buys bitcoin and sells bitcoin futures — we couldn't rely on this approach for that fund because we would need real-time market data that would go up or down significantly.”