Spiko: the Paris issuer of tokenized money market funds, and what makes it risky

Spiko is a Paris start-up that sells a tokenized money market fund range to companies and individuals: shares of regulated French funds, recorded as tokens on public blockchains such as Ethereum, Polygon, Base and Stellar. On 11 November 2026 CoinDesk profiled its flagship fund, SAFO, as the largest tokenized fund in the world, with $2.39 billion in assets on 27 October. That figure, and the ranking, come from Spiko itself.

There is no Spiko token. No governance coin, no points programme, no airdrop. What you buy is a fund share, and one token equals one share. So the questions are not about supply or unlocks. They are about a bank swap, a short list of admin keys and a company that is three years old.

Spiko’s own dashboard, read on 11 November 2026, shows $3.24 billion across all its funds (converted to dollars) and 16,978 users. The company raised a $90 million Series B on 6 October 2026. On chain, the record shows a long gap: the Polygon price feeds of its main T-bill funds and of its dollar Cash & Carry fund published no new value between 15 July and 15 October 2026.

What Spiko is: a tokenized money market fund issuer, not a crypto protocol

Spiko was founded in June 2023 by Paul-Adrien Hyppolite, its chief executive, and Antoine Michon, its chief operating officer. Both come from the French civil service: Hyppolite worked at the European Commission and the French Treasury, Michon advised a French minister on public-sector reform and, according to Spiko’s about page, worked at Palantir before.

The funds themselves live in a French investment company with variable capital, SPIKO SICAV, approved by the AMF on 5 April 2024 and set up on 15 May 2024 as a UCITS, the EU’s framework for funds that can be sold to the general public. Several firms share the work, and the split matters when something goes wrong:

• Twenty First Capital, a Paris asset manager authorised by the AMF under number GP-11000029, is the management company named in the prospectus. It also manages the three T-bill funds.
• Amundi Asset Management manages the investments of SAFO under a delegation.
• Spiko Finance SAS, an investment firm licensed by the ACPR (number 19183), distributes the shares, keeps the shareholder register on the blockchains and acts as transfer agent.
• CACEIS Bank is the depositary and holds the assets and client cash; CACEIS Fund Administration computes the net asset value (NAV).
• PricewaterhouseCoopers Audit is the statutory auditor of the SICAV.

The SICAV’s board has three members: Hyppolite as chairman, Michon as managing director and Victor Charpiat, head of legal and compliance at Spiko Finance. Spiko says on its website that it never holds client money, which stays at CACEIS.

The first two funds went live on 12 June 2024 with a minimum of one euro or one dollar. Spiko called them the first UCITS funds in the EU with a fully tokenized register. Growth was slow at first: Index Ventures put assets above $400 million at the July 2025 Series A. Then SAFO arrived in March 2026, and Spiko reported $2.7 billion placed in its funds by early October 2026, more than five times the level of a year before.

The funds: T-bills, SAFO and a basis-trade fund

The prospectus dated 4 May 2026 lists four sub-funds. Three are classic short-term money market funds that buy government bills and repurchase agreements in their own currency. The fourth, SAFO, works in a very different way (next section). A fifth line, Cash & Carry, runs a market-neutral crypto basis trade; Spiko’s documentation labels it a professional fund and it is not in the UCITS prospectus.

On top of the management fee, the prospectus allows up to 0.10% a year of operating costs. There is no entry fee, exit fee or performance fee on the UCITS funds. Shares accumulate interest in their price rather than paying it out, so the token’s value rises slowly day after day.

Yields move with central bank rates. On 11 November 2026 the dashboard showed 30-day yields of 2.84% for the euro Smart Cash class, 4.37% for the dollar class and 2.41% for the euro T-bill fund. These are past figures, not a promise.

How a Spiko share is minted, priced and redeemed

Every holder must pass identity checks first. The prospectus is blunt: shares can only be held by and moved between addresses on Spiko’s allowlist. A Spiko token sent to an unknown wallet does not move. This is the main difference with a stablecoin or with DeFi yield tokens, and it is why the shares are not freely traded on exchanges.

Orders for the T-bill funds must reach Spiko Finance before 11:30 Paris time and are filled at the NAV computed that day, which is not known when the order is placed. For SAFO the cut-off is 12:25, with the trade settled the next business day. Investors pay in euros, dollars or pounds, or in stablecoins: since 30 June 2026 Coinbase Payments lets eligible investors subscribe to and redeem EUTBL and USTBL in USDC and EURC on Base. The prospectus warns that a stablecoin redemption may not be paid the same day and may be refused for anti-money-laundering reasons.

Spiko’s documentation gives standard withdrawal times of same day for the T-bill funds, one day for Smart Cash and two days for Cash & Carry. Euro classes also offer instant SEPA withdrawals up to EUR 500,000 a day. Spiko’s 5 November release claims more than 10,000 such withdrawals with a median of 38 seconds.

Behind the screen, Spiko’s technical blog describes OpenZeppelin-based tokens with a separate permission manager. In-house relayers mint new shares after a subscription, add investors to the allowlist and publish the daily NAV to an oracle contract that follows Chainlink’s interface. To redeem, an investor sends tokens to a redemption contract; requests are batched once a day, the tokens are burned and the payout goes out in cash or stablecoins.

The register is spread over several chains. The prospectus lists Ethereum, Polygon PoS, Arbitrum One, Starknet, Base, Etherlink and Stellar, and the investor picks one at subscription. SAFO was added on Solana on 2 July 2026. Stellar carries most of the money: Spiko says $1.65 billion of SAFO, over two thirds, and about nine in ten SAFO investors sat on the Stellar network in late October.

SAFO: why the largest Spiko fund is not a T-bill fund

SAFO, the Spiko Amundi Overnight Swap Fund, launched in March 2026 with Amundi as investment manager and CACEIS as depositary. Its prospectus sets a target of the overnight rate of each currency plus 0.25% a year after fees, over a three-month horizon. The name explains how it gets there. The fund owns a basket of securities, which Spiko describes as “primarily shares of large publicly traded companies” from indices such as the MSCI World, the S&P 500 and the STOXX Europe 600. It then signs a total return swap with a bank for close to 100% of its assets.

Under the swap, the bank receives everything the shares earn or lose, dividends included. In exchange it pays the fund an overnight benchmark: the euro short-term rate for the euro class, SOFR for dollars, SONIA for sterling and SARON for Swiss francs, plus a margin fixed when the swap is signed. The counterparty is BNP Paribas. Spiko’s Smart Cash explainer of 20 March 2026 says the spread is above 0.25% after fees in euros, dollars and pounds and about 0.15% in Swiss francs, and that BNP has committed to that spread until the end of 2027 on EUR 1 billion of notional. SAFO has since grown well past that amount.

Why do this rather than buy bills? The swap lets the fund pay slightly more than T-bill funds while keeping daily liquidity. The bank’s side of the bargain is regulatory: under the Basel III leverage ratio, holding shares through a swap costs it far less capital than owning them, and Spiko says that saving is what funds the spread. Spiko also argues that a company with large balances gets more protection than in a bank account above the EUR 100,000 deposit guarantee, because the fund owns the shares outright at CACEIS.

The flip side is the counterparty. Spiko says the swap is settled and reset to zero every business day, so the exposure to the bank is limited to one day of market moves, and that any counterparty must be approved by Amundi’s credit risk committee and rated at least A- by Fitch. The prospectus spells out what a default would mean: the fund would be left holding the equity basket. In a stock market crash on the same day as a bank failure, that basket could be worth less than the fund’s NAV. Spiko calls a BNP Paribas default very unlikely, and the bank is rated A+ by S&P. Still, this is a bank risk that a T-bill fund does not carry, and the standard risk score of 1 out of 7 that Spiko shows for Smart Cash does not single it out.

An outside view exists for the euro class. Spiko said on 20 September 2026 that S&P Global Ratings gave Smart Cash Euro a AAAf fund credit quality rating and an S1+ volatility rating, the top of both scales. According to Spiko, the agency based the credit rating first on BNP Paribas, then on the daily reset and on Spiko’s own risk management.

The SAFO terms also allow swing pricing, which can move the NAV by up to 0.50% when net flows pass a threshold, and a redemption gate that can be triggered at 25% of net assets. The T-bill funds can gate redemptions at 10% of net assets, for at most 20 NAV dates over three months. None has been reported used.

Who can buy Spiko’s funds

The sources do not all say the same thing about SAFO. The prospectus lists the main share classes as open to all investors with a one-unit minimum; the D classes are reserved for clients of certain distributors. Spiko’s March 2026 explainer says Smart Cash is for businesses, institutional investors or individuals. Amundi’s launch release quotes Jean-Jacques Barbéris saying SAFO gives “professional investors” fast access to cash management.

In practice Spiko markets accounts to start-ups, small firms, holding companies, real-estate companies, freelancers and individuals, with country pages for France, Spain, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands. Its documentation keeps a list of countries where onboarding is restricted. Spiko’s 5 November release says more than 5,000 businesses hold nearly 90% of SAFO, with a typical holding of about $60,000.

For UK readers, SAFO is registered with the Financial Conduct Authority, according to CoinDesk. “London is now our main office alongside Paris. We are currently looking at the U.S. market,” Hyppolite told the outlet, adding that nothing is under way yet in the US. Until then, the prospectus keeps US persons out of the funds.

On MiCA: the shares are UCITS fund units, not crypto-assets, so the EU crypto rules do not apply to them. The stablecoins used to pay, USDC and EURC from Circle, are e-money tokens under MiCA, and CACEIS has held a crypto-asset service provider licence from the AMF since 23 June 2025 to keep them.

Is SAFO really the largest tokenized fund?

Spiko says so. Its blog post of 29 October 2026 puts SAFO at $2.39 billion on 27 October, against $2.37 billion for Circle’s USYC and $2.19 billion for BlackRock’s BUIDL, and says SAFO passed BUIDL on 19 October and USYC days later. A release of 5 November 2026 gives an earlier snapshot, dated 23 October and sourced to rwa.xyz: $2.38 billion for SAFO, $2.37 billion for USYC and $2.17 billion for BUIDL.

Independent confirmation is thin. The outlets that covered the claim repeat the company’s numbers, and the BUIDL figure itself moves by $20 million between Spiko’s two documents. Trackers such as rwa.xyz list SAFO’s currency and D classes as separate assets, so no public tracker shows one SAFO total that a reader can check against the claim. Spiko’s own dashboard does show EUR 2.01 billion in the euro Smart Cash class alone, which is consistent with a fund above $2 billion.

The more telling contrast is in the holders. Spiko counts about 13,000 SAFO wallets, against 102 for BUIDL and 30 for USYC. BUIDL, issued through Securitize, and USYC are sold to institutions, with minimums Spiko puts at $5 million and $100,000; so is J.P. Morgan’s new tokenized fund on Solana, which asks $1 million. Spiko starts at one euro.

Spiko’s flows show how fast money moves around inside the group: SAFO took $3.47 billion of subscriptions since launch, including $0.93 billion switched from other Spiko funds, and paid out $1.05 billion in redemptions, according to the company.

The NAV oracle that stopped for three months

Spiko publishes each fund’s daily NAV to on-chain oracle contracts so that wallets, dashboards and lending markets can price the shares. The history of those contracts on Polygon, read on 11 November 2026, shows a long pause. The USTBL feed posted a NAV of 1.089641 on 15 July 2026 at 14:09 UTC and its next update came on 15 October at 16:00 UTC, at 1.099313. The EUTBL feed went from 1.055050 on 15 July to 1.060886 on 15 October with nothing in between, and the dollar Cash & Carry feed did the same (1.018747, then 1.028354). Before and after the gap, the feeds updated every working day.

SAFO’s euro-class feed on Arbitrum kept updating every working day through the summer. DefiLlama, which reads these feeds to estimate Spiko’s fees, flags the 15 October jump on its Spiko page as three months of T-bill and Cash & Carry yield booked in one day.

Under the prospectus, the official NAV is computed off chain by CACEIS and orders are filled at that NAV, so subscriptions and redemptions placed through Spiko do not use the on-chain number. The pause matters for anyone who used the on-chain price as a reference: a dashboard or a lending market reading those feeds would have seen the shares frozen in value for 13 weeks, then jump by between 0.5% and 0.9% in a day. The on-chain record does not show why the updates stopped.

Who controls the contracts

Spiko holds every key that matters, by design: a regulated fund must be able to freeze, claw back and know its holders. The permission manager described in Spiko’s technical post has a super-admin role that can upgrade the contracts and hand out permissions, an exceptional-operator role that can pause the tokens, daily operators that mint, a burner role held by the redemption contract and an allowlister that admits investors. The tokens sit behind upgradeable proxies.

The post says the super-admin role is controlled by a multisig but gives no signers, no threshold and no time delay before an upgrade. Holders therefore rely on Spiko’s internal controls and on the regulators that supervise Spiko Finance and the fund, not on code they can check.

Spiko has also opened the shares to DeFi in a limited way. Since September 2025, according to Spiko, its T-bill fund shares can be pledged on Morpho to borrow EURCV, the euro stablecoin of Societe Generale’s SG-FORGE. On 22 July 2026 a Morpho market run by Steakhouse Financial extended this to SAFO shares. Any such market is only as sound as the price feed it reads, which is why the oracle record above matters beyond Spiko’s own app.

Audits and supervision

The smart contracts were reviewed by Trail of Bits. Its summary report, dated 23 November 2023, covers one engineer-week of work from 2 to 6 October 2023. It lists four issues, including that the price publishing function could overwrite an existing price or lock the oracle, and that tokens could get stuck in the redemption contract. A fix review is appended.

That review covers the 2023 code. SAFO, the Stellar and Solana versions and the Coinbase payment flow came later. DefiLlama lists two audits for Spiko but links only this report.

At fund level the checks are those of any French UCITS: an AMF-approved prospectus, a depositary bank, a statutory auditor and a daily NAV computed by an independent administrator and, according to Spiko, sent to the AMF, Bloomberg and Morningstar. No hack, depeg, regulatory sanction or lawsuit involving Spiko has been reported.

Funding and what comes next

Spiko raised $22 million in a Series A led by Index Ventures on 17 July 2025, with White Star Capital, Frst and Rerail, plus angels including Revolut co-founder Nikolay Storonsky. The $90 million Series B of 6 October 2026 was led by New Enterprise Associates, with Index, Bpifrance, Speedinvest, Wintermute Ventures and former Bundesbank president Axel Weber among others. Spiko puts its total raised at $120 million. The valuation was about $800 million, according to CoinDesk; Spiko’s own announcement gives none.

The company says the money goes to new cash and fixed-term products, more European countries and local teams. Its competitors are mostly American: BlackRock’s BUIDL, Circle’s USYC, Franklin Templeton’s BENJI and Ondo Finance. In Europe, the closest moves come from the asset managers Spiko works with: Amundi put a STOXX Europe 600 fund on Ethereum in early November.

Next to watch: Spiko’s next published SAFO total, any explanation of the summer oracle pause, the size of SAFO’s swaps beyond the EUR 1 billion BNP commitment, and whether a US launch happens in 2027.