Baillie Gifford BAGEY: 118-Year-Old UK Asset Manager Issues Native Tokenized Bond Fund on Solana Baillie Gifford—a 118-year-old Scottish asset manager overseeing $237 billion in assets—has done something no traditional asset manager has done before: issued a UK FCA-regulated bond fund natively on a public blockchain. ① BAGEY (Baillie Gifford Enhanced Yield Fund) targets an annualized yield of ~7% by investing in short-term investment-grade corporate bonds. BNY Mellon (the world’s largest custodian bank) provides the tokenization and wallet infrastructure. NatWest acts as the depositary. Crucially, the blockchain serves as the legal register of ownership—not a "wrapper," not a "mapping"—the on-chain tokens are the fund shares themselves. ② Baillie Gifford rejected all "wrapper" solutions (SPVs, nominee holding structures) and insisted on native issuance. Solana’s low fees make it ideal for retail and smaller institutional investors, while Ethereum supports integration with existing large institutional DeFi participants. The dual-chain deployment was intentional. ③ My own take: The significance of this announcement is widely underestimated. This isn’t just “a company launched a product on Solana”—it’s a 118-year-old, $237 billion UK traditional asset manager, backed by the world’s largest custodian bank, operating within the FCA regulatory framework, choosing blockchain as its legal ownership ledger. As Theo Golden (Head of Digital Assets at Baillie Gifford) put it best: “What ETFs did for mutual funds, tokenization will do for the entire investment industry.” This is not an experiment. This is a core player in traditional finance declaring: “We believe in this infrastructure.” @solana @Solana_zh #BaillieGifford #BAGEY #Solana #TokenizedBonds