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Before writing about crypto, I spent a couple years covering the traditional asset management industry (mutual funds, ETFs, etc).
Janus Henderson was one of the companies on my beat. So when I saw the investment firm’s name in my crypto-centric inbox this morning, I was once more reminded of the ongoing TradFi-DeFi intersection.
The announcement dealt with the launch of a credit infrastructure DeFi protocol called Grove, which allocated $1 billion from the Sky ecosystem to the newly tokenized Janus Henderson Anemoy AAA CLO Strategy (JAAA).
Janus Henderson partnered with Anemoy and Centrifuge to launch its first tokenized fund — offering access to short-term US Treasury bills — last September.
Nick Cherney, Janus Henderson’s innovation head, noted at the time that “bringing robust institutional collateral pools into decentralized autonomous organizations and stablecoin ecosystems” is a big piece of the TradFi-DeFi bridge.
Now, Janus Henderson has a tokenized version of the CLO (Collateralized Loan Obligation) ETF it launched in 2020. The fund, which seeks income via collateralized loan obligations of various maturities, has more than $20 billion assets under management.
“CLOs are just one of the many assets ripe for movement into DeFi due to their attractive yield profile and structure,” Grove Labs co-founder Sam Paderewski argued.
Janus Henderson moving funds onchain reflects the firm “preparing for the possibility that blockchain technology will transform traditional finance in the long term,” Cherney said in a statement today.
It’s early days, with stablecoins’ market cap around $240 billion. Tokenized private credit and tokenized Treasury products have grown considerably over the past year, but are only valued around $14 billion and $7 billion, respectively.
So this tokenized CLO offering represents just another development in what many expect to be a massive space. We’ll continue to monitor.
