Janus Henderson and Centrifuge on Tuesday launched JQQQ, a fund that tracks the Nasdaq-100 under licence from Nasdaq and is issued only on the Stellar blockchain, the asset manager said. Janus Henderson manages roughly $500 billion. CryptoWatchDesk last covered the issue on Friday, when 22 listed companies objected to OKX-ICE trading their shares on-chain.
That dispute is the point here. JQQQ is sponsored by the fund manager, with the index licensed, rather than a token minted by a third party against shares held somewhere else, the distinction CoinDesk drew in its report. The scale is still small: Janus Henderson says its on-chain platform holds over $1 billion in Treasury, credit and equity strategies, about 0.2% of the firm’s assets by our arithmetic.
Our explainer on tokenized stocks sets out how the two models differ for holders. Buyers of a third-party token don’t necessarily get shareholder rights, and some of those products are separate instruments that only track the share price.
“As a top five global provider of tokenized funds, Janus Henderson is committed to becoming the world’s most technologically sophisticated asset manager,” said Nick Cherney, the firm’s head of innovation.
The product sits outside the US. Legally, JQQQ is one ring-fenced portfolio inside Anemoy Capital SPC, a British Virgin Islands company, with Anemoy Asset Management as investment manager and Janus Henderson Investors US LLC as sub-manager. The release says it is not available to US persons and describes the fees only as “competitive”.
It follows SPXA, Janus Henderson’s on-chain fund tracking the S&P 500, which CoinDesk described as the first index fund put on-chain under an S&P Dow Jones Indices licence. Stellar’s tokenized real-world assets passed $4 billion this year, the release said.
Institutional managers are spreading funds across several chains. On Monday we reported on Aviva Investors’ sterling fund share class on the XRP Ledger, and last week on JPMorgan Asset Management’s money market funds on Solana.
Entry is set at 100,000 USDC for professional investors outside the US, and Centrifuge’s portal was not yet taking subscriptions, according to The Defiant.
This article is for information only and is not investment advice.