Baillie Gifford has launched the Enhanced Yield Fund — ticker BAGEY — a UK-regulated tokenised bond fund that uses blockchain as its official register of record, making it one of the clearest examples of a traditional asset manager fully committing to on-chain fund infrastructure rather than using blockchain as a supplementary layer alongside conventional record-keeping.
The fund is structured as an Open-Ended Investment Company under UK regulation and is available to eligible investors in the UK, Switzerland, and the Cayman Islands. It provides exposure to short-duration corporate bonds, with BNY as operational partner and NatWest Trustees as depositary. The fund runs on both Ethereum and Solana — a dual-chain architecture that reflects the practical reality of institutional on-chain markets, where different investor segments and counterparties operate on different networks.
The defining feature is that blockchain is the register of record rather than a mirrored or supplementary system. Unlike earlier tokenised fund structures — including JPMorgan's MONY and BNY's Digital Asset Data Insights deployment — where conventional and on-chain record-keeping run in parallel, BAGEY's ownership records exist solely on-chain. This is a structural commitment to blockchain infrastructure rather than an exploratory addition to conventional fund architecture.
Baillie Gifford manages approximately $225 billion in assets — a figure that reflects the firm's total AUM rather than the BAGEY fund specifically — making it one of the largest traditional active managers to launch a fully on-chain fund product. The combination of Baillie Gifford's institutional credibility, BNY's operational infrastructure, NatWest's depositary role, and FCA regulatory oversight gives BAGEY a stronger institutional foundation than most tokenised fund launches to date.