BNY Puts $8.6 Trillion On-Chain as UK Tokenized Fund Launch Sets New Precedent
Something quietly historic happened in British finance on July 30, 2026. Baillie Gifford — one of the UK’s most respected investment management firms — became the first to launch a fully native tokenized fund on the Solana blockchain, a move that plants a regulated flag at the intersection of traditional asset management and digital infrastructure. This isn’t a pilot program buried inside a fintech lab. It’s a live, UK-regulated product, backed by one of the world’s largest custodians.
Key takeaways
- Baillie Gifford launched the UK’s first fully native tokenized fund, built on the Solana blockchain, on July 30, 2026.
- The fund is backed by BNY, the world’s largest custodian with more than $59 trillion in assets under custody and administration.
- BNY is simultaneously shifting its core transfer agency record-keeping onto blockchain to serve an $8.6 trillion market across 7.6 million accounts.
- BlackRock and BNY’s own Dreyfus unit are expected to follow with their own tokenized products on the same infrastructure, according to reporting by the Financial Times.
- The launch sets a regulatory precedent for UK-regulated tokenized funds and could accelerate institutional adoption of blockchain platforms.
Baillie Gifford and BNY: What They Actually Built
The fund isn’t tokenized in a superficial sense — it’s natively built on-chain, meaning ownership records live directly on Solana’s blockchain rather than being mirrored from a legacy system. That distinction matters enormously. Most financial products that claim a blockchain connection still rely on traditional record-keeping underneath. This one doesn’t.
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