Janus Henderson (AUM $500bn) and Centrifuge have launched JQQQ, a Nasdaq-100 index fund issued natively onchain rather than as a tokenized version of an existing product. Fund shares will initially be available on the Stellar network under a license from Nasdaq, and the fund is open to non-US professional investors with a minimum subscription of 100,000 USDC. Centrifuge’s investment portal says the fund is “seeding soon.”
The detail that matters most is the Nasdaq license. A fund that wraps the Invesco QQQ ETF needs no index license because Invesco holds one. A fund replicating the index directly does. The distinction draws a line between JQQQ and synthetic wrappers such as Kraken’s xStocks, without naming them. Janus Henderson says JQQQ is the first blockchain native fund offering Nasdaq-100 exposure through an issuer sponsored strategy.
JQQQ is one of three routes to the Nasdaq-100 onchain, and they differ in who can hold them and what they own. The DTC tokenized the Invesco QQQ Trust, a fund with close to $500 billion in assets under management (AUM), during its July production exercise, giving institutions a tokenized entitlement to the real ETF. Backed’s xStocks wraps QQQ as a tracker certificate for crypto native traders. JQQQ is the issuer sponsored option, the structure many institutions say they prefer, on a permissionless chain for non-US professionals. Same benchmark, different legal rights, different investor pools, and in JQQQ’s case, AUM starting from zero.
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