What Is Tokenised fund?

A tokenised fund is a regulated investment fund whose shares are issued and recorded as tokens on a blockchain, instead of (or in parallel to) entries in a traditional transfer agent’s share register. Investors hold fund shares as ERC-20-style token balances at their blockchain addresses, and share transfers settle onchain.

Fund: a fund is a pooled investment vehicle — money from many investors is combined and managed according to a mandate, with each investor owning shares that represent a proportional claim on the pool’s assets. The share price is set by the fund’s net asset value (NAV). Traditional examples include mutual funds, money market funds and hedge funds.

Tokenisation: tokenisation means representing ownership of an asset as a blockchain token. The legal asset (fund share, bond, real estate) continues to exist in the real world — the token is its transferable ownership record. Tokenised funds are one of the fastest-growing classes of real-world assets (RWA), because tokenisation gives fund shares properties they never had before: near-instant 24/7 transferability, use as collateral in decentralised finance, programmability via smart contracts, and settlement without layers of intermediaries.

Notable examples:

  • BUIDL (BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) — launched in March 2024 by BlackRock with Securitize as tokenisation platform and transfer agent. BUIDL holds cash, US Treasury bills and repurchase agreements (see US Treasury note), targets a stable $1 token value, and accrues daily dividends paid out monthly as new tokens. Originally on Ethereum, it expanded to multiple chains and quickly became the largest tokenised fund, crossing $1 billion in assets. Circle offers a facility to redeem BUIDL tokens for the USDC stablecoin, making it near-instantly liquid.

  • JLTXX (JPMorgan OnChain Liquidity-Token Money Market Fund) — launched in May 2026 by J.P. Morgan Asset Management on the public Ethereum blockchain, its second tokenised money market fund. JLTXX is backed by US Treasuries and repos, accepts both cash and stablecoins for subscriptions, and is designed to support stablecoin issuers under the US GENIUS Act. It is available to qualified institutional investors (minimum investment $1 million) via the Morgan Money platform, and grew to roughly $700 million in onchain assets within two months of launch.

Similarities with vaults: like a vault, a tokenised fund pools assets from multiple investors, is managed according to a strategy or mandate, and issues onchain share tokens whose value tracks the underlying assets — conceptually both are “deposit assets, receive shares” structures, and both may expose deposits and redemptions through the same token standards, such as ERC-4626 or the asynchronous ERC-7540 extension.

Differences from vaults: a vault is a self-custodial smart contract structure — the rules live in code, anyone (in permissionless vaults) can deposit or withdraw at any time, and the assets under management are typically other onchain tokens. A tokenised fund is a regulated, custodial legal entity: the underlying assets (e.g. Treasury bills) are held offchain by a custodian, the token is a representation of a legal share register entry, transfers are usually restricted to KYC-verified, whitelisted addresses, NAV is computed by a fund administrator rather than read from onchain prices, and investors’ rights come from securities law rather than from smart contract code. In short: a vault’s trust anchor is code, a tokenised fund’s trust anchor is regulation — with the token as the distribution and settlement layer. Vault protocols such as Lagoon and Enzyme protocol increasingly blur this line by wrapping regulated share classes and offchain strategies into onchain vault interfaces.

See also