BNP Paribas issues tokenized currency fund on Ethereum

The asset management company of BNP Paribas has issued tokenized shares of a French-registered money market fund on a public blockchain.

The project was announced on February 20, marking an important advancement for the bank in exploring tokenization technology by transitioning from a private ledger to the Ethereum public network. The project employs a permissioned access model on Ethereum, allowing only pre-approved regulated participants to hold or transfer tokenized shares, ensuring compliance with financial regulations while leveraging the transparency and security of a public blockchain. This experiment integrates multiple business lines of BNP Paribas: the asset management company acts as the fund issuer, the securities services department serves as the transfer agent and is responsible for wallet infrastructure and private key custody, and the AssetFoundry platform from corporate and investment banking handles the tokenization process and provides connectivity to Ethereum. This pilot is based on previous experience with a tokenized money market fund issued on a private blockchain in Luxembourg, evaluating technology and operational models by testing different approaches.