Baillie Gifford Launches First True Onchain Fund as FCA Clears Path

Published by James Harris on June 23, 2026June 23, 2026

Baillie Gifford, the Edinburgh-based fund manager with £286 billion under management, has launched what it calls the UK’s first fully onchain investment fund, a dollar-denominated short-term corporate bond vehicle structured as a regulated Open-Ended Investment Company. BNY handles the tokenization and wallet infrastructure, NatWest Trustee and Depositary Services takes the depositary role, and the fund targets a yield of around 7%. Access is currently limited to qualified investors in the UK, Switzerland, and the Cayman Islands.

The distinction Baillie Gifford is drawing matters more than it might appear. Most products marketed as “tokenized funds” over the past three years have been wrappers: a traditional fund structure with a digital receipt sitting on top, the blockchain recording ownership but not actually running the legal bookkeeping. BAGEY is designed so the chain itself maintains the fund register, which is a structurally different thing. The FCA’s April 2026 policy statement PS26/7 explicitly confirmed that asset managers can use public DLT networks for fund registers under appropriate controls, arriving just as this product launched. That sequencing is not accidental. The regulatory framework and the first real use case appear to have been developed in parallel, which is a more deliberate institutional entry than the industry usually sees.

Theo Golden, Baillie Gifford’s head of digital assets and tokenization, said directly that digitizing old infrastructure will not by itself improve finance. That is a pointed thing for a fund manager to say about most of its competitors’ tokenization strategies.

The Copycat Token Problem

Within hours of the launch, a token using the same $BAGEY ticker appeared on Solana, with no verified connection to Baillie Gifford’s regulated product. It currently trades at essentially zero and has around 132 holders. The creators claimed it launched on Ethereum under FCA oversight, which the source material does not corroborate. This is a predictable pattern: a legitimate institutional product with a memorable ticker launches publicly, and opportunistic tokens appear immediately to capture search traffic and confused retail buyers. It happened around BlackRock’s BUIDL fund and has become a near-automatic response to any high-profile tokenization announcement. The damage is reputational as much as financial, attaching scam associations to a product that went through considerable regulatory process to exist.

The broader implication is that the FCA’s PS26/7 framework, if it works as intended, could accelerate similar launches from other UK fund managers. BNY’s Katey Neate described BAGEY explicitly as a template. With a regulator that has now published clear rules on public DLT use in fund registers, the path for a second and third mover is shorter than it was for Baillie Gifford. The more interesting question is whether institutional appetite for onchain fund infrastructure extends beyond fixed-income products, where the yield justification is straightforward, into equity or multi-asset structures where the operational case is harder to make.