Amundi’s first tokenised fund (and surprisingly conservative outlook)

Amundi launched its first tokenised fund in November. Despite a relatively pessimistic short-term outlook, Europe’s largest asset manager thinks tokenised finds could catch on among crypto-savvy digital natives in the longer term.

“The tokenisation of assets is a transformation set to accelerate in the coming years around the world,” said Jean-Jacques Barbéris, Head of Institutional and Corporate Clients and ESG at Amundi. Barbéris was commenting on the launch of Amundi’s first tokenised share of the Amundi Funds Cash EUR money market fund – its first available in tokenised form.

Amundi’s wasn’t the UK’s first tokenised fund. The month before, Federated Hermes launched its first non-US digital assets initiative by offering two of its UCITS money market funds[1]  (Federated Hermes Short-Term Sterling Prime Fund and Federated Hermes Short-Term U.S. Prime Fund) in tokenised forms.  Prior to that, in June 2025, Baillie Gifford launched the UK’s first tokenised OEIC[2] , a feeder to its Strategic Bond Fund. More asset managers could soon join the party: Aviva Investors announced [3]. But it is a significant development for Europe’s largest asset manager to embrace tokenised funds, and one which highlights the potential of tokenised funds for the industry – even if Amundi is surprisingly bearish about the opportunity (in the short term at least).

 How excited is Amundi about tokenised funds?

Amundi’s December 2025 report into the fund tokenisation market[4]  puts the value of the market at $10 billion at the end of last year (compared to a global asset management industry overseeing around $128 trillion), with a neutral estimate that sees it reaching $120 billion by 2030. Its conservative scenario sees tokenised funds reaching $30 billion in AUM by 2030. These outlooks don’t paint a particularly exuberant picture, compared to other forecasts. Its most bullish scenario – $300 billion in AUM by 2030 – posits the same market size as McKinsey’s most conservative projection, and half that of BCG’s conservative estimate.

 Tokenised funds – 2030 global AUM projections ($ billion)

Source : Amundi BI / BCG / McKinsey

Amundi is also conservative about the potential revenue that tokenised funds could generate for the asset management industry by 2030. Its most optimistic estimate is $3 billion – well below the equivalent projections from McKinsey ($12 billion) and BCG ($13 billion). So why is Amundi bothering? In essence, it believes that tokenised funds’ major growth spurt may well not start until after the end of this decade. In the words of the report’s author: “Whereas the revenues to be generated from tokenised funds in the short term may be underwhelming, asset managers that look beyond the horizon line and that prepare for an on-chain world that is already in the making may well end up on the winning side of the industry.”

 Can tokenised funds become a trillion-dollar market?

In order for global tokenised funds’ AUM to break through the $1 trillion threshold – as McKinsey’s bullish model and both BCG’s neutral and bullish projections anticipate by 2030 – Amundi thinks that traditional institutions (banks, fund platforms and brokers) will need to incorporate digital assets directly into their client offerings. Amundi does not predict this transformation happening fastest in Europe, or even in the US. The report envisages that, while the US has a head start in the tokenised fund space, the greatest future growth will come from digital natives in Asia. As much as 58% of the world’s digital wallets are based in Asia, according to recent analysis from Triple A, a crypto payment service provider.

Crypto readiness is seen as an important precursor to the adoption of tokenised funds: as Amundi says, “investors that are the most likely to proactively invest in tokenized fund assets are the ones that will be most familiar with the crypto environment, and for which the learning curve for token investing will be the shorter.” Amundi expects that a portion of the global $4 trillion crypto market cap will migrate into tokenised funds as these crypto-savvy digital natives derisk their holdings, without wanting to move off-chain. “On-chain investors will eventually demand an entirely on-chain experience,” said the report’s authors. “And like traditional off-chain investors, they will want to diversify their portfolio, but without going back to the off-chain world.” This process will also see the digital assets industry become less exclusively the preserve of professional, US-based investors, a demographic that currently dominates the space. It is notable how concentrated the global tokenised fund market currently is: BlackRock’s tokenised US Treasury fund, BUIDL[5] , accounts for $2.2 billion of the approximately $10 billion AUM. But assuming continued development of cryptocurrencies and a supportive regulatory environment, Amundi predicts that the next decade could see digital assets “break the technical ceiling limiting them to the digitally native community and become a usual, non-exotic way of trading assets”.

That, it suggests, could push the market for tokenised funds into the realms of trillions of dollars.

Why (and why not) tokenise a fund?

It’s common for the stated benefits of tokenised funds (and other RWAs) to centre on operational efficiency gains and cost improvements. Amundi’s report, though, argues that this is an inward-looking perspective on the part of the asset management industry, and that it overlooks some of the key benefits for consumers. According to Amundi, the main benefits of tokenised funds for investors are instant order execution, expanded access for a more digitally-focused generation of investors, and 24/7 operability.

But tokenised funds also bring particular challenges. One of these, highlighted by the Investment Association[6] , pertains to dispute resolution and governance. Decentralised ledgers could expose funds to 51% attacks (when a single entity gains control of the majority of a network’s hashing power, potentially enabling it to alter previous transactions and block new ones).

There is also the challenge of implementing robust know-your-customer (KYC) protocols for tokenised funds. While tokenised funds offer many advantages on this front (wallet-based identity verification, on-chain wallet address whitelisting for access control, and the potential for KYC portability across platforms), there is the potential for pseudonymous blockchain wallets to be used to finance illicit activities. This means that tokenised funds need KYC to be built in at the protocol level.

 What’s happening with UK regulation of tokenised funds?

In the UK, the industry is seemingly aware of the potential for a future in which a new generation of investors demands on-chain access to their assets, but is also looking closely at how to address the challenges this raises.

Regulators and industry bodies have been fine-tuning the infrastructure that will support tokenised funds since 2023. A report published in November that year[7]  by the Technology Working Group (part of HMT’s Asset Management Taskforce) proposed a staged progression from trad-fi funds towards a fully distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based fund ecosystem, beginning with a baseline or ‘stage one’ model. This proposed only one significant change from a traditional investment fund: the deployment of DLT for fund registry and transactions, with a private, permissioned chain serving as the master record for the fund unit register. Crucially, fund unit transactions are settled off-chain, via the authorised fund manager, as with traditional funds.

 The FCA’s Executive Director of Markets, Simon Walls, cautioned against the temptation of “technology for technology’s sake”.

“It needs to enhance provision in some way: make things cheaper, or quicker, or increase choice, or enable something that just can’t be done today,” said Walls. “Done right we believe that tokenisation can do this.”[8] The Technology Working Group published its second report[9]  in March 2024. This highlighted three key steps for the next stages of fund tokenisation: enabling on-chain fund settlement using digital money; enabling funds to hold tokenised assets in their portfolios; and expanding the scope to use public permissioned networks. The regulatory environment will continue to evolve; the FCA closed a consultation in February, whose goals included discussing future tokenisation models that use DLT to provide tokenised portfolio management at retail scale, with the results to be announced in due course.

“There are many things that firms can do under our existing rules and more that become possible with the changes we propose enacting now,” said Walls ahead of the consultation. “We stand ready to design the next stage with the industry.”

 [1]https://www.hermes-investment.com/uk/en/intermediary/press/federated-hermes-partners-with-archax-to-offer-tokenised-ucits-money-market-funds/

 [2]https://capitalpioneer.co.uk/revealed-first-uk-tokenised-fund/

 [3]https://www.avivainvestors.com/en-gb/about/company-news/2026/02/aviva-investors-seeks-to-tokenise-products-with-ripple/

 [4]https://about.amundi.com/files/nuxeo/dl/4c73d033-5b89-439b-b702-e4851bd8eec4?inline=

 [5]https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/blackrock-takes-first-defi-step-145710525.html

 [6]https://www.theia.org/sites/default/files/2021-09/Tokenised%20Funds%204%20-%20Disputes%20considerations.pdf

 [7]https://www.theia.org/sites/default/files/2023-11/UK%20Fund%20Tokenisation%20-%20A%20Blueprint%20for%20Implementation.pdf

 [8]https://www.theia.org/sites/default/files/2025-11/Bridging%20the%20Adoption%20Gap%20-%20Aligning%20Digital%20Asset%20Offerings%20with%20Buy%20Side%20Requirements%20%20Nov25.pdf

 [9]https://www.theia.org/sites/default/files/2024-03/Further%20Fund%20Tokenisation%20-%20Achieving%20IF3%20Through%20Collaboration%20%20Mar24.pdf