Real-world asset specialist Centrifuge has launched what it calls the first licensed S&P 500 index fund on blockchain rails, opening one of the world’s most recognized equity benchmarks to on-chain investors. The Janus Henderson Anemoy S&P 500 Fund, dubbed SPXA, went live on Thursday on Base, an Ethereum layer-2 network developed by crypto exchange Coinbase. The offering is the first tokenized index fund licensed by the S&P Dow Jones Indices. It allows the S&P 500, a wide basket of the largest publicly traded U.S. companies that covers roughly 80% of the U.S. equity market, to trade around the clock with transparent holdings. FalconX, a digital asset brokerage, was an anchor investor in the product, while Wormhole, a cross-chain messaging protocol, will handle future expansion to other blockchains. Janus Henderson, a London-based global asset manager with nearly $500 billion in AUM, is serving as sub-investment manager, while Centrifuge's asset management arm Anemoy oversees the fund. The initiative fits into a broader trend of bringing traditional financial instruments such as bonds, funds and equities, often called real-world assets (RWA), onto blockchain rails. Proponents explore tokenization for operational gains, speedier settlements and around-the-clock trading. Centrifuge, which has built infrastructure for tokenizing private credit and fixed income since 2017, sees SPXA as its entry point into equities, a tokenization trend that has recently taken off. "Indices are the best way to bring stocks on-chain," Bhaji Illuminati, CEO of Centrifuge, said in a statement. "They’re simple, collateral-ready and unlock liquidity in ways individual securities can’t." For S&P Dow Jones Indices, the offering is a stepping stone to "build the future of index-linked financial products" traditional finance products are beginning to migrate to blockchain environments, said Cameron Drinkwater, chief product officer at S&P DJI. Read more: Blockchain-Based RWA Specialists Bring $50M to Apollo's Tokenized Credit Strategy
