Baillie Gifford Launches Tokenized Fund on Solana and Ethereum
Traditional asset manager Baillie Gifford is stepping into blockchain with a tokenized fund built on Solana and Ethereum, partnered with BNY.
One of the more traditional names in fund management is making a decidedly non-traditional move. Baillie Gifford, the Edinburgh-based investment firm known for long-term bets on growth companies, is rolling out a tokenized fund that runs on both the Solana and Ethereum blockchains, in partnership with banking giant BNY.
Tokenized funds are essentially the blockchain-native version of a conventional investment fund — think of it as taking the paperwork and back-office processes that normally happen behind the scenes and replacing them with smart contracts on a public ledger. The result is faster settlement, potentially lower costs, and the ability to move fund shares around like digital tokens rather than waiting days for traditional transfers to clear.
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The partnership with BNY — one of the world's oldest and largest custody banks — signals that this isn't a crypto-native experiment. It's a full-on institutional push to bring regulated, traditional finance infrastructure onto public blockchains. BNY's involvement adds a layer of credibility and regulatory weight that purely crypto-focused players can't easily replicate.
Choosing both Solana and Ethereum is a deliberate hedge. Ethereum remains the gold standard for institutional decentralized finance thanks to its deep developer ecosystem and liquidity. Solana, meanwhile, offers blazing transaction speeds and low fees that make it attractive for high-frequency fund operations. Running on both networks gives the product flexibility and broader reach.
This move is part of a broader wave of traditional financial institutions experimenting with asset tokenization, a trend that analysts have flagged as one of the most significant structural shifts in global finance over the next decade. Whether Baillie Gifford's early entry pays off remains to be seen, but the firm is clearly not waiting on the sidelines. Continue reading at CoinDesk.
