Asset manager Janus Henderson and tokenization firm Centrifuge launched JQQQ on Tuesday 27 October, a tokenized Nasdaq-100 fund that the companies bill as the first fund licensed by Nasdaq to track the index on a blockchain. The fund lives on Stellar, which is the only network at launch, according to CoinDesk, which ran the story at 14:21 UTC. Janus Henderson issues and manages the fund. Centrifuge supplies the tokenization rails. Nasdaq licenses the index.
The catch sits in the eligibility line. JQQQ is open only to eligible non-US professional investors, with a minimum ticket of $100,000, according to Cointelegraph, which credits that figure to The Wall Street Journal. The Defiant puts the same minimum at 100,000 USDC and adds that Centrifuge’s investment portal says subscriptions are not yet open. No other outlet we read confirms that last point, so treat it as The Defiant’s reading of the portal on launch day.
The two companies announced the fund in a release distributed through Business Wire, whose web address carries the date 26 October. The details below come from that release as reported by CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, The Defiant, Bitcoin.com News and Crypto Briefing, which agree on the main facts.
What the tokenized Nasdaq-100 fund JQQQ actually is
JQQQ is an issuer-sponsored onchain fund. That label matters more than the ticker. The token is a share in a fund run by a regulated asset manager, and the fund follows the Nasdaq-100 under a licence from the index owner. It is not a wrapper minted by a crypto platform that holds, or says it holds, a basket of US stocks somewhere.
According to Cointelegraph, the fund is a segregated portfolio of an investment company registered in the British Virgin Islands, and it gives investors indirect exposure to the Nasdaq-100. Holders do not own Apple, Microsoft or Nvidia shares. They own a slice of a fund whose performance is meant to track the index.
That setup mirrors the firm’s earlier tokenized funds. On rwa.xyz, the AAA collateralized loan obligation fund JAAA is listed as issued by Anemoy and domiciled in the British Virgin Islands, under the territory’s Securities and Investment Business Act. The Treasury fund JTRSY is described on the same site as a BVI professional fund open to non-US professional investors, the very audience JQQQ now targets.
Sean Wasserman, head of index product management at Nasdaq, said in remarks reported by CoinDesk that demand “continues to grow for exposure to established, transparent benchmarks” as investors look for new ways into markets through digital infrastructure. Anil Sood, chief strategy and growth officer at Centrifuge, argued that “tokenization becomes much more powerful when the assets investors want to own” can also act as building blocks for onchain finance, CoinDesk reported.
Building blocks here means use inside other onchain products. Bitcoin.com News reports that fund shares could, in principle, feed programmable portfolios or serve in lending or as collateral. It also notes that every one of those uses depends on regulation, permissions, integrations and investor eligibility. None of them is live at launch, as far as any source says.
Who can buy JQQQ, and who cannot
The short answer for most Coindaro readers: you cannot. Four conditions stack up.
- The investor must be a professional, not a retail client.
- The investor must be outside the United States, so US persons are excluded whatever their wealth.
- The minimum subscription is $100,000 (100,000 USDC, per The Defiant).
- Subscriptions were not yet open on launch day, according to The Defiant’s reading of Centrifuge’s portal.
Access controls are not new for these funds: the first Janus Henderson product on Centrifuge, in 2024, accepted subscriptions only from approved wallets. The KYC process for JQQQ, its fees, its redemption terms and its assets at launch were not disclosed in any source Coindaro read.
On those terms the obvious candidates are institutions that already hold stablecoins onchain and want index exposure without leaving the chain, such as funds or trading firms. No source names a first investor. The JPMorgan money market fund on Solana reported last week works on the same pattern: a qualified-investor product with a $1 million entry, as described in our report on JPMorgan’s tokenized money market fund.
A licensed fund share versus a stock token
Tokens that follow the Nasdaq-100 already trade. Coindaro reported on 24 October that a single Nasdaq-100 tracker token made up about 80% of the $25.6 billion traded in tokenized stocks on BNB Chain in the third quarter, in our piece on tokenized stock volume on BNB Chain. So JQQQ is not the first token tied to the index. What the companies claim is that it is the first fund licensed by Nasdaq to do this onchain.
CoinDesk lays out the difference. Third-party stock tokens may be backed by shares held with a custodian, or they may be separate instruments that only follow a price. Holders do not necessarily own the shares or get shareholder rights. JQQQ does not give share ownership either, but the issuer is an asset manager and the index owner has signed off.
The difference has become a live issue for US companies. CoinDesk recalls that 22 companies objected to a plan by OKX and ICE for tokenized trading of their shares. Microsoft, Alphabet and Wells Fargo were among them, as set out in our report on the 22 companies objecting to OKX-ICE stock tokens.
A closer cousin is the issuer-led route. Securitize’s SECZ shares, covered in our report on Securitize putting its own shares onchain, are another case where the party behind the asset organises the token rather than a crypto exchange doing it from the outside.
Two older tokenized funds hold about $921 million
The London-based asset manager oversees roughly $500 billion, according to CoinDesk, and says its onchain strategies now exceed $1 billion across Treasuries, structured credit and public equities. The asset pages on rwa.xyz, read on 27 October 2026 (the network charts are marked as of that date), show the two largest pieces. On both, Anemoy is the issuer; on JTRSY, Janus Henderson is named as sub-advisor.
| Fund | What it holds | Total asset value (rwa.xyz, 27 Oct 2026) | Management fee | Networks | Inception |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| JTRSY (Janus Henderson Treasury Fund) | US Treasury bills with 0 to 3 months left to maturity | $341,960,837 (down 0.96% over 30 days) | 0.25% | 10, including Ethereum, Base, Stellar and Solana | 5 August 2024 |
| JAAA (Janus Henderson AAA CLO Fund) | AAA-rated collateralized loan obligations | $579,381,745 (down 1.32% over 30 days) | 0.50% | 8, including Ethereum, Solana and Stellar | 1 May 2025 |
| SPXA (Anemoy S&P 500 Fund) | S&P 500 exposure | Not checked | Not checked | Not checked | 2025, per CoinDesk |
| JQQQ | Nasdaq-100 exposure | Not disclosed | Not disclosed | Stellar only | 27 October 2026 |
JTRSY and JAAA together come to about $921 million, which fits the “more than $1 billion” figure once the equity fund is added. Both shrank slightly over the past 30 days. The Treasury fund charges a 0.25% management fee and the CLO fund 0.50%, according to the rwa.xyz page for JTRSY and the JAAA page. No fee has been published for JQQQ.
SPXA is the direct precedent. CoinDesk describes it as the first tokenized index fund licensed by S&P Dow Jones Indices, launched last year. JQQQ repeats the formula with the other benchmark that US equity investors watch most closely. The pattern goes back to September 2024, when the firm announced it would sub-advise Anemoy’s Liquid Treasury Fund on Centrifuge, its first tokenized fund.
Why Stellar, and why the licence counts
Stellar is the exclusive network for JQQQ at launch. The companies say the real-world asset market on Stellar went past $4 billion in 2026, according to Bitcoin.com News. Both earlier Janus Henderson funds already run on Stellar among other chains, and Centrifuge has used the network for its deJTRSY and deJAAA products, so the plumbing was in place.
The licence is the newer part. An index provider controls who may sell a product under its name and how. Nasdaq signing a licence for an onchain fund tells other asset managers that the index owner will deal with tokenized products directly, rather than leaving the field to unlicensed trackers. Crypto Briefing writes that Nasdaq widened its index licensing in early 2026; Coindaro did not find that detail confirmed elsewhere.
For the market, the effect is a split between two kinds of Nasdaq-100 exposure onchain. One kind is open to anyone on a crypto exchange, trades heavily and comes with questions about backing and rights. The other is licensed, issued by a known fund manager and closed to everyone but professionals. Whether the second kind draws real money is the number to watch.
What it means for readers in Europe and the United States
US readers are out by design: the fund excludes US investors entirely. Americans who want the index still have the classic route of a Nasdaq-100 ETF listed on a US exchange. Our explainer on how an exchange-traded fund works covers the basics.
European professional investors are, on paper, non-US professionals. But no source says the fund is marketed in the European Union, France or Italy, and none mentions a position from the AMF in France or Consob in Italy. Selling a BVI fund to EU professional clients normally runs through national private placement rules, and nothing published on 27 October says how JQQQ will handle that. Retail investors in Paris, Milan or London have no access at a $100,000 professional-only minimum.
What is still unknown about JQQQ
Several basic facts were missing from every account of the launch on 27 October:
- the management fee and any other costs;
- assets in the fund at launch, if any, and trading volume;
- how and when holders can redeem their shares;
- the date subscriptions open, if The Defiant’s reading of the portal is right;
- whether and when the fund will reach networks other than Stellar, as JTRSY and JAAA did.
The first public figure to look for is JQQQ’s own total asset value once it appears on rwa.xyz or a similar tracker, next to the $342 million in JTRSY and the $579 million in JAAA. That number will show whether professional investors want Nasdaq exposure in token form.