BNP Paribas Asset Management has issued a tokenised share class of a French-domiciled money market fund on Ethereum, expanding its blockchain experiments into public infrastructure. The shares were created using the bank’s AssetFoundryTM platform and deployed under what the firm described as a “permissioned access model on Ethereum.”
Under that model, “holdings and transfers are restricted to eligible and authorised participants, in line with applicable regulatory requirements,” according to the announcement. The structure allows the fund to operate on a public blockchain while limiting access to approved counterparties.
The initiative was described as a limited internal test. “The initiative was conducted as a one-off, limited intra-group experiment, enabling BNP Paribas to test new end-to-end processes, from issuance and transfer agency to tokenisation and public-blockchain connectivity, within a controlled and regulated framework,” the company wrote.
BNP Paribas Asset Management acted as the fund issuer, while the BNP Paribas Securities Services business handled transfer agency and dealer functions. The tokenised share class was issued directly onchain through AssetFoundryTM, BNP Paribas’ digital asset platform.
Although the blockchain layer is public, access remains gated. The permissioned model restricts transfers and holdings to approved participants, preserving regulatory controls around investor eligibility and fund distribution. The approach blends blockchain-based recordkeeping with conventional compliance requirements.
Edouard Legrand, Chief Digital and Data Officer at BNP Paribas Asset Management, said the issuance builds on earlier work. “This second issuance of tokenised money market funds, this time using public blockchain infrastructure, supports our ongoing efforts to explore how tokenisation can contribute to greater operational efficiency and security within a regulated framework,” he said in a statement.
The Ethereum pilot follows earlier experiments by BNP Paribas in tokenised fund issuance. Last year, the firm worked with Allfunds Blockchain to launch what it described as the “first natively tokenised money market fund,” using a distributed ledger setup tailored for fund distribution networks.
Beyond asset management, BNP Paribas has been involved in institutional blockchain initiatives spanning payments and settlement infrastructure. The bank has been linked to efforts to connect the Swift financial messaging network to Ethereum Layer 2 infrastructure and has also participated in discussions among large global banks exploring stablecoin issuance models.
These projects reflect a pattern among major European banks: testing tokenisation within existing regulatory guardrails rather than launching open retail-facing crypto products. Money market funds, with their short-duration, cash-like characteristics, have become a frequent testing ground for such pilots.
Money market funds are widely used by institutions for short-term liquidity management. Their structure — high liquidity, stable net asset value targets, and frequent subscriptions and redemptions — makes them suitable for testing digital issuance, transfer tracking, and settlement automation.
By placing a share class on Ethereum while keeping investor access restricted, BNP Paribas is testing how public blockchain infrastructure can coexist with regulated fund operations. The experiment does not open the product to the broader crypto market, but it does place traditional fund records into a blockchain environment with real issuance and transfer processes.
As institutional tokenisation efforts expand, the focus has increasingly turned to process redesign: how issuance, transfer agency, and settlement functions can be executed onchain without altering the legal structure of the fund itself. This latest pilot suggests that public blockchain connectivity is now part of that operational testing framework.
