Bybit launches first regulated institutional vault for fixed income products

Bybit just made a move that would have sounded like science fiction three years ago: offering institutional investors access to fixed income products from PIMCO, one of the world’s most established bond managers, through a regulated crypto exchange vault.

The new institutional vault, live on Bybit’s RWA Earn section, represents the exchange’s push to bridge the gap between traditional fixed income strategies and the crypto infrastructure that institutional players are increasingly comfortable using. Products available include PIMCO’s PDO and CMB International Asset Management’s CMIGB Fund, both packaged as tokenized real-world asset offerings.

What the vault actually does

The structure sits under Bybit’s broader RWA Earn suite. The vault integrates with Bybit’s custody and credit services, creating a single access point for institutions that want yield without leaving the crypto ecosystem.

The Mantle Vault, which went live in December 2025, crossed $150 million in assets under management by early 2026. Bybit has also been collaborating with entities like Plume to expand access to institutional fixed income vaults.

The regulatory foundation matters

The exchange secured a full Virtual Asset Platform Operator license from the UAE’s Securities and Commodities Authority in October 2025. It also achieved MiCA compliance across the European Economic Area.

Bybit’s institutional custody arm, ByCustody, currently secures over $5 billion in assets across more than 30 professional asset managers. The service covers over 2,000 institutions, a figure that represents a 100% year-on-year increase as of early 2026.

What this means for investors

For institutional allocators who already have crypto exposure through Bybit’s custody services, the vault creates a natural pathway into fixed income without establishing a separate relationship with a traditional prime broker.

The risk, as always with exchange-hosted yield products, sits with counterparty exposure and the durability of the regulatory frameworks Bybit operates under. Institutions considering the vault will need to weigh the convenience of single-platform access against the concentration risk of holding both trading and yield positions with one provider.

The $150 million that flowed into the Mantle Vault within months of its launch suggests the market is willing to make that trade-off. Whether the fixed income vault can match or exceed that pace will be the clearest signal of whether institutional demand for regulated crypto yield products is a trend or a tidal wave.

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