Baillie Gifford Launches Tokenized UCITS Strategic Bond Feeder Fund on Ethereum Pilot
Baillie Gifford, one of the UK’s largest mutual fund managers with £197 billion AUM, has selected Ethereum to pilot a fully tokenized UCITS fund. The regulated Strategic Bond Feeder Fund will issue digital tokens held in a self-custody wallet and initially offered to a whitelisted group of institutional clients. UCITS (Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities) is an EU framework for publicly traded securities funds. This move marks an institutional step toward on-chain asset tokenization, leveraging Ethereum’s smart-contract infrastructure to improve liquidity, transparency and settlement efficiency.
Bullish
The pilot tokenization of a regulated UCITS fund by a major asset manager signals growing institutional adoption of on-chain asset issuance. This development is bullish for Ethereum, as it validates its smart-contract network for high-value financial products, potentially driving increased transaction volume and network fees. Similar to earlier tokenization pilots by other funds, short-term impacts may be modest, but long-term it strengthens Ethereum’s role in institutional finance and could attract further tokenization projects.