Baillie Gifford, the 118-year-old Edinburgh-based asset manager overseeing roughly $237 billion to $260 billion in assets, has launched its Enhanced Yield Fund, ticker BAGEY, as a fully on-chain tokenized bond product issued natively on Ethereum and Solana. The fund targets a yield of approximately 7% and settles subscriptions and redemptions in USDC or fiat currencies.

The product marks a structural departure from the wrapper-based tokenized funds that dominate the current market. BAGEY shares are minted natively on public blockchains, meaning Ethereum and Solana serve as the legal register of ownership. No traditional fund wrapper sits between the investor and the token — an arrangement that shifts settlement, transfer and record-keeping functions onto the chains themselves.

Fund construction

BAGEY is an actively managed short-duration bond portfolio with a duration of roughly two years and an average credit quality rating of BBB. It holds a mix of public corporate and government bonds. The fund calculates net asset value daily.

The minimum investment sits at $100, though eligibility is restricted to professional investors — a combination that suggests Baillie Gifford is using the low entry point to widen distribution channels among qualified institutions and intermediaries rather than retail accounts.

Custody and tokenization are handled by four firms: BitGo Bank & Trust, BNY, Anchorage Digital and Archax. Splitting those functions across established banking and digital-asset custodians gives the fund redundant institutional infrastructure, a factor compliance teams at allocators typically weigh when approving on-chain instruments.

Rollout timeline

BAGEY launched on June 22, 2026, through Baillie Gifford's digital assets unit, BGDA UK. By September 29, the firm had expanded availability to eligible professional investors in Switzerland, Hong Kong and the Cayman Islands — three jurisdictions whose regulatory regimes for tokenized securities have matured fastest outside the United Kingdom.

The expansion cadence — four jurisdictions in roughly three months — indicates Baillie Gifford treats the product as a core distribution line rather than a pilot. For a firm founded in 1908 and built on long-horizon equity strategies, a fixed-income tokenized fund represents a notable diversification of its product shelf into blockchain-native infrastructure.

Operational significance

Native issuance on two chains carries operational consequences. Dual deployment on Ethereum and Solana means the register of ownership exists in parallel across ecosystems with different validator sets, finality properties and tooling — requiring the custody stack to reconcile holdings across both networks. The choice of USDC as a settlement rail alongside fiat ties the fund's subscription mechanics to Circle's stablecoin infrastructure while preserving a traditional currency path for allocators not yet equipped for on-chain settlement.

For the broader tokenization market, the entry of a manager of Baillie Gifford's scale — with more than two decades of institutional relationships — signals that natively issued, on-chain-registered funds are moving from experimental structures to distributable products. The involvement of BNY, Anchorage, Archax and BitGo also consolidates a service-provider bench that subsequent issuers can replicate.

The near-term question is geographic expansion: whether Baillie Gifford extends BAGEY's availability to additional professional-investor jurisdictions, and whether the firm follows with further tokenized strategies under the BGDA UK umbrella.