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The UK’s home for tokenised equity. Independent news, insight and resources for founders raising capital, investors deploying it, and the firms supporting both — as the regulation, infrastructure and opportunity converge.

BNY Launches Blockchain Based Transfer Agency Covering 8.6 Trillion Dollars in Fund Assets

  • Writer: Shawn Jhanji
    Shawn Jhanji
  • Aug 3
  • 3 min read
For UK founders and investors watching the tokenisation sector professionalise, the biggest news last week did not come from a crypto native platform. It came from BNY, the world's largest custody bank, which has just put the plumbing of fund ownership itself onto a blockchain. BNY announced on 30 July 2026 the launch of Digital Transfer Agency capabilities, extending its traditional fund servicing business to digitally native funds. The bank is moving the core recordkeeping function of a transfer agent, tracking who owns what shares in a fund, onto a single onchain ledger, reducing reliance on the layers of intermediaries that currently reconcile ownership records across custodians, registrars and fund administrators. The service launches first with clients in the US and UK. BNY Investments Dreyfus will issue a new digitally native money market fund using BLIQUID tokens to represent fund shares. Baillie Gifford has already gone live with the Baillie Gifford Enhanced Yield Fund, described as the first publicly available, fully native UK regulated tokenised fund. BlackRock is expected to use the same rails for BSTBL, a tokenised share class of its money market fund built to meet stablecoin reserve requirements.

For UK founders and investors watching the tokenisation sector professionalise, the biggest news last week did not come from a crypto native platform. It came from BNY, the world's largest custody bank, which has just put the plumbing of fund ownership itself onto a blockchain.


BNY announced on 30 July 2026 the launch of Digital Transfer Agency capabilities, extending its traditional fund servicing business to digitally native funds. The bank is moving the core recordkeeping function of a transfer agent, tracking who owns what shares in a fund, onto a single onchain ledger, reducing reliance on the layers of intermediaries that currently reconcile ownership records across custodians, registrars and fund administrators.


The service launches first with clients in the US and UK. BNY Investments Dreyfus will issue a new digitally native money market fund using BLIQUID tokens to represent fund shares. Baillie Gifford has already gone live with the Baillie Gifford Enhanced Yield Fund, described as the first publicly available, fully native UK regulated tokenised fund. BlackRock is expected to use the same rails for BSTBL, a tokenised share class of its money market fund built to meet stablecoin reserve requirements.


The scale is the headline number. BNY's Digital Transfer Agency will initially cover 8.6 trillion dollars of assets across 7.6 million investor accounts, evidence that tokenised recordkeeping is moving from pilot programmes into the core infrastructure of one of the world's largest fund administrators.


The launch lands a week after Securitize, the platform we previously flagged as the first to win approval to custody tokenised securities inside a regular broker dealer, added an SEC registered investment adviser licence to its Wall Street credentials. Where Securitize built its position from the crypto native side of the market, BNY is building the equivalent capability from inside the incumbent custody system. The two moves together suggest the custody and recordkeeping layer for tokenised assets is now being contested from both directions at once, which is good news for anyone hoping the infrastructure matures quickly enough to eventually support smaller issuers, not just blue chip money market funds.


For UK platforms and advisers working with earlier stage tokenised equity, the relevant lesson is architectural rather than competitive. BNY's model, a single onchain ownership ledger reconciled against a regulated administrator, is close to the structure that SEIS and EIS focused platforms will eventually need if tokenised seed shares are to sit comfortably alongside Companies House as the legal register of record. What BNY has just built for 8.6 trillion dollars of institutional fund assets is a preview of the plumbing question the earliest stage of the market has not yet answered for itself, a theme explored further elsewhere in today's brief.


Key Takeaways


  • BNY launched Digital Transfer Agency capabilities on 30 July 2026, covering 8.6 trillion dollars in fund assets across 7.6 million accounts.

  • Baillie Gifford's Enhanced Yield Fund is now the first publicly available, fully native UK regulated tokenised fund to use the rails.

  • BlackRock and BNY Investments Dreyfus are lined up as early users, with BSTBL designed to meet stablecoin reserve requirements.

  • The launch follows Securitize's SEC investment adviser registration by a week, intensifying competition for the custody and recordkeeping layer of tokenised finance.

  • The single ledger model BNY is deploying at institutional scale mirrors the registrar question tokenised SEIS platforms will eventually need to solve with Companies House.


Sources:

BNY press release (bny.com); PR Newswire; CoinDesk, 29 to 30 July 2026 coverage.

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