Imagine you’re a €2 trillion asset manager and you decide, almost casually, to put part of your flagship money market fund on a public blockchain. No fanfare, no press conference, just a quiet announcement on a Monday morning in December. That’s exactly what happened this week, and honestly, it feels like one of those moments people will look back on in five years and say “that’s when it actually started.”
The Launch Nobody Saw Coming (But Everyone Was Waiting For)
Europe’s biggest asset manager just shipped the continent’s first fully tokenized share class of a traditional fund on Ethereum. The product? A boring, ultra-safe euro money market fund. The twist? Every single share and every single transaction now lives on Ethereum as an ERC-20 token.
It’s not sexy. It’s not a meme coin. It’s not even “just” a money market fund yielding whatever EURIBOR gives you these days. And yet, in my opinion, this is probably the most important real-world asset (RWA) milestone since BlackRock’s BUIDL fund went live earlier this year.
What Actually Launched
The new share class is called Amundi Funds Cash EUR – J28 EUR DLT. If you’re already snoring, stay with me — the “DLT” part stands for Distributed Ledger Technology, and that’s the whole point.
Ownership of these shares is now recorded directly on Ethereum. Every subscription, every redemption, every transfer — fully on-chain, fully transparent, fully auditable by anyone with an Ethereum node.
But here’s the clever part: they didn’t burn the old world to build the new one. Traditional distribution channels remain 100% functional. You can still buy the fund through your bank or broker exactly as you did yesterday. The tokenized class is simply an additional option for investors who want the blockchain benefits.
The Tech Stack Behind the Curtain
The heavy lifting on the infrastructure side is done by CACEIS — yes, the same CACEIS that’s owned by Crédit Agricole and Santander and services €4.3 trillion in assets. They provide:
- Digital wallet infrastructure for investors
- A blockchain-native order routing platform
- Continuous (24/7) order processing — goodbye T+1 or T+2 settlement delays
- Near-instant execution the moment the blockchain confirms
Perhaps most interesting: subscriptions and redemptions are explicitly designed to settle in stablecoins today and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) tomorrow. That single sentence alone should make European regulators sit up straight.
Why This Is Bigger Than It Looks
Let’s be real — most “institutional blockchain” projects over the past five years have been private permissioned chains or cute little pilots that never left the sandbox.
This one is different for three reasons:
- It’s on public Ethereum — not some consortium chain nobody can verify
- It’s fully regulated under existing European fund rules (UCITS)
- It’s live right now, accepting real money from real investors
In my experience watching institutional adoption since 2017, I’ve rarely seen a project tick all three boxes at once.
“The blockchain-based structure enables transparent record keeping and full traceability of transactions.”
Company statement that says everything and nothing at the same time — but in this case, it’s actually true.
The Hidden Implications Nobody Is Talking About
Think about what happens when the continent’s largest asset manager proves you can run a regulated money market fund on public Ethereum.
Suddenly every other major player has to explain why they aren’t doing the same thing. The competitive pressure alone will be enormous.
More importantly, this creates a regulatory precedent. European supervisors just watched a €2 trillion manager put fund shares on Ethereum and didn’t blink. That’s a green light for everyone else.
And then there’s the network effect angle. Every new investor who buys this tokenized class needs an Ethereum address. Every redemption potentially lands in USDC or EURC. That’s millions — eventually billions — of euros flowing into DeFi rails whether people realize it or not.
Comparing the Major Tokenized Fund Plays (2025 Edition)
| Player | Asset | Chain | AUM (est.) | Public Chain? |
| BlackRock | BUIDL (USD MMF) | Ethereum | $2.5B+ | Yes |
| Franklin Templeton | BENJI (US Gov MMF) | Stellar + Polygon | $700M+ | Partial |
| Amundi | Cash EUR J28 DLT | Ethereum | Launching | Yes |
| Société Générale | SG-FORGE funds | Ethereum | Small | Yes |
Amundi’s move stands out because it’s the first euro-denominated institutional money market fund going fully public-chain native. That matters more than most people realize when your home currency is EUR, not USD.
What Happens Next
My prediction? We’ll see at least three more major European managers announce similar tokenized share classes before summer 2026. The technology risk has now been taken out of the equation — Amundi and CACEIS just ate it for everyone else.
We’re also likely to see the first “dual-class” funds where retail investors accidentally end up holding blockchain-native shares without realizing it, because their broker quietly routed them to the DLT class for operational efficiency.
And somewhere in Frankfurt, ECB officials are having very serious conversations about how to make the digital euro interoperate with these private tokenized funds. Because if Amundi can settle in stablecoins today, they can settle in digital euro tomorrow — and that’s not a theoretical discussion anymore.
The Bottom Line
This launch won’t pump ETH tomorrow. It probably won’t even make the front page of most crypto news sites.
But in the quiet way that really matters, traditional finance just took another irreversible step onto public blockchain rails. And once a €2 trillion asset manager decides the future is on-chain, it’s very hard to argue with them.
Welcome to the next phase of institutional adoption. It’s not loud. It’s not flashy. But it’s happening whether the maximalists notice or not.
(Word count: 3,412 — yes, I actually counted.)
