BNP Paribas Tests Public Ethereum for Tokenised Money Market Fund

BNP Paribas Asset Management has issued a tokenised share class of an existing French-domiciled money market fund using the public Ethereum blockchain, marking another step in the group’s exploration of distributed ledger technology within regulated asset management.

The tokenised shares were issued under a permissioned access model, meaning that holdings and transfers were restricted to eligible and authorised participants. While deployed on a public blockchain, the experiment maintained a controlled framework aligned with regulatory requirements.

This initiative follows BNP Paribas Asset Management’s earlier tokenised money market fund issuance in Luxembourg, which was conducted on a private blockchain. The new project leverages a different technological and operational configuration by integrating with Ethereum’s public infrastructure.

Within the pilot:

• BNP Paribas Asset Management acted as the fund issuer.

• BNP Paribas Securities Services served as transfer agent and fund dealing services provider.

• BNP Paribas CIB’s AssetFoundry platform delivered the tokenisation framework and connectivity to the public blockchain.

According to Julien Clausse, Head of AssetFoundry at BNP Paribas, the platform provides digital asset capabilities ranging from tokenisation and blockchain connectivity to wallet infrastructure within a controlled setup. The initiative enables the bank to assess operational and governance implications of tokenising money market funds.

For the pilot transaction, BNP Paribas Securities Services operated the wallet setup and retained control of the private key.

The project was conducted as a limited intra-group experiment, designed to test end-to-end processes — from issuance and transfer agency services to tokenisation and public blockchain connectivity — within a regulated environment.

Edouard Legrand, Chief Digital and Data Officer at BNP Paribas Asset Management, stated that the initiative supports the firm’s broader effort to evaluate how tokenisation could enhance operational efficiency and security while remaining compliant with regulatory standards.

Source: BNP Paribas announcement, February 2026.