Baillie Gifford, a 118-year-old investment firm based in the Scottish capital of Edinburgh, unveiled a fixed-income tokenized fund in association with global custody giant BNY, the companies said on Monday.
Baillie Gifford Enhanced Yield Fund (BAGEY) is denominated in dollars, and gives eligible investors access to an actively managed, short-duration portfolio of public corporate bonds using the Ethereum and Solana public blockchains, according to a press release.
The fund is operated through a U.K.-regulated Open-Ended Investment Company (OEIC), a type of collective investment fund structured as a limited liability company that spreads capital from multiple investors across equities or bonds.
The fund, which currently offers a yield of around 7%, will be available to eligible investors in the U.K., Switzerland and Cayman Islands, subject to applicable laws, regulations and distribution restrictions.
Tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs) has taken the traditional finance world by storm, but merely wrapping legacy infrastructure in a digital layer will not fundamentally improve finance, said Theo Golden, head of digital assets and tokenization at Baillie Gifford.