New York Life Investment Management is tokenizing a high-yield corporate bond strategy for the first time, partnering with Centrifuge on the NYLIM Anemoy fund settled in USDC.
New York Life Investment Management, a $807 billion asset manager, is putting a high-yield corporate bond strategy onchain for the first time. The firm partnered with tokenization platform Centrifuge to launch the NYLIM Anemoy U.S. High Yield Corporate Bond Segregated Portfolio, ticker HYB.
The partnership, announced Tuesday, marks NYLIM’s first tokenized product and one of the first high-yield corporate bond strategies available onchain. Subscriptions and redemptions settle in Circle’s USDC, and the underlying portfolio, investment process and risk management stay under NYLIM’s control. Centrifuge, whose protocol carries $1.64 billion in TVL per DefiLlama, provides the tokenization rails.
Junk Bonds Go Onchain
“Tokenization represents a compelling evolution in how investment solutions can be accessed, managed and distributed across both public and private markets,” said Thomas Sy, head of multi-asset solutions at NYLIM, in the companies’ joint release.
HYB is structured as a BVI segregated portfolio, the same wrapper Centrifuge uses across its fund lineup, giving tokenholders direct shareholder recourse to the underlying assets. The offering documents state the product is not being offered or sold to U.S. persons. Centrifuge CEO Bhaji Illuminati told The Block the fund is aimed at stablecoin issuers, DeFi users and DAO treasuries seeking yield beyond Treasury-backed products, with a liquidity arrangement through Grove, part of the Sky ecosystem, meant to support near-instant redemptions.
High-yield corporate bonds, commonly called junk bonds, carry higher credit risk in exchange for higher yields than investment-grade debt. Tokenized real-world assets to date have leaned on Treasuries and private credit; HYB extends that onto sub-investment-grade corporate debt.
Wall Street’s Widening List
NYLIM joins Apollo Global Management and Janus Henderson on Centrifuge’s roster of traditional asset managers, whose Anemoy-branded funds already span Treasury bills and a AAA-rated CLO portfolio exceeding $700 million in assets. Coinbase separately named Centrifuge its preferred tokenization infrastructure partner and took a stake in the firm.
The deal follows asset managers extending tokenized fixed income beyond government debt, including Baillie Gifford’s UK-regulated tokenized bond fund built on Solana and Ethereum with BNY. Centrifuge co-founder Anil Sood said the NYLIM deal “is about moving funds onto infrastructure that is more transparent, more efficient, and more composable.”