Tokenised funds: the gap between announcements and reality

Demonstration article. The asset managers, funds, people and figures cited are fictional.

• The 37 tokenised funds launched in Europe since 2022 announced 27.5 billion euros in assets; 5.2 billion was actually subscribed.
• The “investor commitments” cited at launch were often non-binding letters of interest.
• Less than 2% of tokenised assets changed hands in a year, and a large share comes from investors linked to the asset managers.

When it presented the tokenised version of its euro money market fund in 2023, Valmont Gestion announced a target of 1.5 billion euros in assets within eighteen months, backed by “firm commitments from several institutional investors”. Three years later, according to the fund’s latest annual report, the tokenised share class amounts to 140 million euros.

Valmont is not an isolated case. Across the 37 tokenised fund launches recorded in Europe since 2022 in our sample, cumulative announced assets reach 27.5 billion euros. Assets actually subscribed, as shown in filed documents, come to 5.2 billion.

A document-based method

For each fund, we noted the target or commitment mentioned at launch, then the assets of the tokenised share class in annual and half-yearly reports, updated prospectuses and, where available, data published on the blockchain used. Where the two sources differed, we used the regulatory figure.