For the past three years, tokenized funds have largely been dominated by asset management’s big dogs. BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, WisdomTree… they’ve all brought funds onchain.
This week, a Parisian startup took the top spot in the league table.
On Thursday, Spiko announced that its Spiko Amundi Overnight Swap Fund (SAFO) had reached $2.38 billion in assets, edging past Circle’s USYC ($2.37 billion) and BlackRock’s BUIDL ($2.17 billion). More impressive still, SAFO launched just seven months ago.
Compared to many of the largest tokenized funds, SAFO stands out in two ways:
First, SAFO isn’t a money market fund. It aims to deliver modestly higher yields than conventional MMFs through a different strategy. Managed by Amundi, it holds a portfolio of securities and swaps their returns with BNP Paribas for an overnight interest rate plus a spread. See our detailed explanation here.
Second, its customer base looks very different from that of most tokenized funds. More than 5,000 businesses hold nearly 90% of SAFO’s assets. As Spiko CEO Paul-Adrien Hyppolite put it: “Main Street got there first.”
We called the Spiko team to take a closer look. A few insights:
Who’s investing: Across Spiko’s funds, tech companies account for 25–30% of assets, professional services another 20%, and crypto firms just 5%. Positions between €100,000 and €10 million make up more than 60%.
How they get there: Most direct inflows come from self-service customers, who can invest without opening a traditional securities account. Third-party distributors, including partners such as Memo Bank and Coinhouse, account for another 20–25% of assets.
How they use it: Customers treat Spiko like an operating treasury account: more than €8 billion flowed through its funds over the past year, roughly three times current assets. Over 40% of SAFO’s instant withdrawals happened outside banking hours.
With 85% of its assets still coming from France, Spiko’s next challenge is to replicate its growth internationally. A recent $90 million Series B should give it the resources to do so.
The other expansion opportunity is crypto, where Spiko targets three groups:
Exchanges looking to offer yield on customer stablecoin balances.
Crypto funds and stablecoin issuers that need a liquid, yield-bearing cash buffer.
DeFi vault curators, which Spiko sees as potential distributors of traditional yields at a time when crypto lending often pays less than overnight rates.
The irony is that Spiko has overtaken crypto-focused competitors largely without their customers. Now it wants those customers too.
IN TODAY’S BRIEFING:
Binance suffers multi-billion dollar hack
ICE to launch perpetual futures on Hyperliquid
SoFi brings tokenized deposits to retail banking
HIGH SIGNAL NEWS
Binance suffers multi-billion dollar hack. At the time of writing, an estimated $6 billion in assets have been affected, with roughly $3 billion frozen by stablecoin issuers including Tether and Circle. The situation remains fluid, while both Binance co-founders have stated on X that the exchange will cover all hack-related losses incurred by affected users. 🥷
ICE to launch perpetual futures on Hyperliquid. The NYSE parent has partnered with Trade[XYZ], the largest operator of real-world asset perpetual futures on Hyperliquid, to establish a regulated U.S. trading venue built on Hyperliquid's infrastructure. The platform will offer 24/7 leveraged trading across equities, crypto, commodities, and currencies, with ICE providing exchange and clearing services. Both ICE and billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller also announced investments in Trade[XYZ]. 🇺🇸
Ripple receives final OCC approval for national trust bank. The approval allows Ripple to establish a federally supervised trust bank to manage reserves backing its RLUSD stablecoin and provide digital asset custody services to institutional clients. 🏦
Bit2Me receives regulatory approval for tokenized securities exchange in Spain. Spain's CNMV has authorized the crypto firm's subsidiary Bit2Me STX to operate a trading and settlement platform under the EU's DLT Pilot Regime. The platform will support 24/7 trading of tokenized stocks and bonds, with instant settlement using tokenized euro deposits. 🇪🇸
TOP STORY
SoFi Bets on Tokenized Deposits to Grow Its Lending Business
Two digital dollars: Last week, U.S. digital bank SoFi launched SoFi Earn (SOFIE), a tokenized deposit paying a variable 4.40% APY with FDIC insurance up to applicable limits. Together with its SoFiUSD stablecoin, SoFi is now the first U.S. national bank to offer retail customers both instruments.
Why it matters: Banks have largely developed tokenized deposits for institutional payments, from JPMorgan’s JPMD to Europe’s CBMT initiative. SoFi is taking a different approach, bringing tokenized deposits to consumer savings. The strategy also resembles that of crypto exchanges: Coinbase offers USDC rewards and onchain lending, while Kraken pays rewards on idle stablecoin balances. But rather than relying on stablecoin rewards or crypto lending, SoFi is offering an insured bank deposit.
How it works: Each SOFIE token represents a $1 deposit at SoFi Bank and sits inside SoFi Crypto, the bank’s in-app trading product. Customers can redeem it to a SoFi bank account or convert it 1:1 into SoFiUSD to buy crypto or move money onchain. Once converted, the funds leave the deposit, lose FDIC protection and stop earning interest.
Why tokenize? Until conversion, SOFIE works more like a crypto-adjacent savings account than a transferable digital dollar. The token cannot move to external wallets, other customers or DeFi applications, and SoFi’s internal records, not the blockchain, determine ownership. A conventional savings account with stablecoin conversion could currently offer the same features.
Second attempt: SOFIE is SoFi’s fifth crypto launch in about a year and part of its second run at the business. SoFi first offered crypto trading from 2019 until December 2023, when its bank charter forced it to comply with bank holding company rules. It returned after the OCC cleared national banks for crypto custody and trading in 2025.
SoFi’s crypto launches, 2019 to 2026
Built on SoFiUSD: Most of what SoFi has launched since its return runs on SoFiUSD. SoFi Crypto settles trades in the stablecoin. Big Business Banking, SoFi’s platform that gives companies fiat and crypto accounts in one place, uses it for 24/7 money movement. Since September, SoFi’s card program has also been migrating to SoFiUSD settlement on Mastercard, and SoFi plans to offer the same setup to other card issuers via its Galileo platform.
Yield for idle dollars: SoFiUSD, however, cannot pay interest. From January 18, 2027, the GENIUS Act will bar payment stablecoin issuers from paying holders yield solely for holding the coin, while tokenized deposits fall outside that ban. With SOFIE, the U.S. bank can pay its crypto users interest on dollars they hold, while SoFiUSD covers payments and transfers.
The bigger prize: Every dollar a customer holds in SOFIE is a deposit that can fund SoFi’s loans. Lending produced $807 million in Q3, nearly 60% of SoFi’s $1.37 billion in adjusted net revenue. SoFi now draws about 90% of its funding from deposits and estimates that this shift has cut its funding costs by $745 million a year compared to warehouse financing.
A familiar playbook: Winning those deposits with above-market rates is a long-standing SoFi strategy. SOFIE’s 4.40% exceeds both the 3.30% SoFi pays on qualifying savings accounts and its average deposit funding cost of 3.07% in Q3. CEO Anthony Noto frames the higher rate as an acquisition cost.
“We use the interest rate for customer acquisition to replace the cost of physical locations, to replace the cost of human beings, and it’s a great return for us,” Noto said on SoFi’s Q3 earnings call.
Outlook: That return depends on SOFIE attracting new money; savers who simply move existing balances into it would only cost SoFi more. That new money would have to come from crypto users, and SoFi still has relatively few of them. At the end of Q3, it counted 503,000 crypto accounts, about 3% of members, which generated $1.6 million in net transaction revenue. Noto describes crypto as a business with “higher growth and earlier-stage revenue,” and SoFi is now counting on it to grow its deposit base as well.
Borja Neira works on tokenized financial products and market structure at Tempo, the payments-focused blockchain backed by Stripe and Paradigm.
What’s the strategic rationale for SoFi’s tokenized deposit and stablecoin offering, and will other banks follow?
SoFi’s move makes sense when you consider its business model. Consumer lending remains a major revenue driver, and stable deposits help fund those loans. As stablecoins gain adoption, banks risk losing customer deposits or seeing their funding become less predictable. Tokenized deposits offer a potential response.
By linking its interest-bearing tokenized deposits with SoFiUSD, SoFi gives customers an easy way to move between earning yield and using stablecoins for payments, around the clock. This could attract stablecoin holders into SoFi’s deposit base, strengthen its funding position, and ultimately support more lending and interest income. The opportunity becomes more significant as stablecoin adoption grows.
I expect smaller, lending-focused banks and digital banks to explore similar models first. They have strong incentives to attract deposits and can often move faster than larger incumbents. Revolut and Nubank, which are also expanding their stablecoin offerings, are potential candidates.
Larger universal banks may take longer. Many still favor closed tokenized deposit networks and view public stablecoins as a threat to their deposit base. I believe they will eventually recognize the opportunity, but first they need to embrace stablecoins as part of their banking models.
Aave Labs: VP Compliance, London 🇬🇧
BitGo: Operations Specialist, Frankfurt 🇩🇪
Bitpanda: Lead Technical PM, Protocol (Vision Chain), Vienna 🇦🇹
BVNK: CEO / MD UK, London 🇬🇧
Chainlink Labs: Partnerships Lead, Banking & Capital Markets, Remote 🌎
Dune: Head of Product, Europe (remote) 🌎
Galaxy: Director, Head of Execution, London 🇬🇧
Lightspark: Regulatory Compliance Officer, EU, Tallinn 🇪🇪
OKX: Deputy General Counsel/Head of UK Legal, London 🇬🇧
OpenFX: Growth Lead, Europe | Institutional Markets, London 🇬🇧
OpenZeppelin: Senior Product Marketer, Financial Institutions, Remote 🌎
Stripe: Account Executive, Bridge - Hunter (Stripe Crypto and Stablecoins), London 🇬🇧
Kalshi | $1 billion | Series G : Leading prediction-market platform.
PhotonPay | $40 million | Series C : Hong Kong fintech building a stablecoin-powered OS for global wallets, cards, and payouts.
Mural | $15 million | Series A : Global banking and stablecoin infrastructure for companies and AI agents.
Predicate | $8 million | Series A : Compliance layer for onchain digital-asset transactions.
Birch Hill | $4 million | Seed : Onchain private-credit firm that assesses, structures, and distributes U.S. credit.
DeFi-ying the Fed? Monetary Policy Transmission to Stablecoin Deposit Rates (ECB) — This paper finds that Fed policy changes transmit only weakly and unevenly to stablecoin deposit rates on lending platform Aave. In the short run, rates can even move in the opposite direction as falling crypto prices reduce leverage demand more than interest-rate arbitrage pushes rates up. Over time, DeFi rates converge toward money-market rates.
Blockchain Revenue Report, 2026 (1kx) — The report estimates that blockchain-related revenues will reach $100 billion in 2026, down 28% year on year. But the revenue mix is shifting: institutional adoption and broader uses such as tokenized assets, payments and prediction markets now account for 30% of the total. Public companies capture 16% of revenues, up from 7% in 2022, while blockchain transaction fees represent less than 3%.
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