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BNP Paribas tokenized a money market fund on mainnet Ethereum via its AssetFoundry platform on February 20, with permissioned access, zero public details, and no retail involvement whatsoever. It is still one of the most important things a European bank has done on-chain.
Let’s get the headline out of the way: BNP Paribas — the largest bank in Europe, over $3 trillion in assets, a global systemically important institution — issued a tokenized share class of a French-domiciled money market fund on public Ethereum. Not a private chain. Not a sandbox. Ethereum mainnet, the same network settling $175 billion in stablecoins and hosting $17 billion in tokenized real-world assets.
That matters more than the fund itself.
What Actually Happened (and What Didn’t)
BNP Paribas Asset Management acted as issuer. Securities Services handled transfer agency. CIB’s AssetFoundry platform provided the tokenization layer and blockchain connectivity. The whole thing was an intra-group experiment — no external investors, no public placement, no retail access. The bank disclosed neither the size of the issuance nor any on-chain addresses. Private keys were held by Securities Services in a controlled environment — custodied infrastructure, not self-custody, and definitely not DeFi in any meaningful sense.
The permissioned model uses gated tokens: only whitelisted participants can hold or transfer them. Think of it as a walled garden built on an open highway. The blockchain is public. The access is not.
This is not BNP Paribas’s first tokenization experiment. In 2025, the bank ran a similar pilot on a private blockchain in Luxembourg. The deliberate shift to Ethereum signals a move past the lab phase into stress-testing whether regulated products can live on public infrastructure without compromising governance.
The Bigger Play: Twelve Banks, One Euro Stablecoin
The tokenized fund is only half the picture. BNP Paribas is simultaneously co-founding Qivalis, an Amsterdam-based joint venture with eleven other European banks — ING, UniCredit, CaixaBank, BBVA, Danske Bank, DekaBank, DZ Bank, KBC, Raiffeisen Bank International, SEB, and Banca Sella. The consortium, which BBVA joined in early February 2026, is building a MiCA-compliant euro-pegged stablecoin, with a commercial launch targeted for the second half of 2026 pending an electronic money institution license from the Dutch Central Bank.
Jan-Oliver Sell, formerly of Coinbase Germany, is running the show as CEO. Sir Howard Davies, ex-chairman of NatWest and the UK’s Financial Services Authority, chairs the supervisory board. The ambition is explicit: a European alternative to the dollar-dominated stablecoin market, where USDT and USDC account for roughly 85% of a $300 billion-plus asset class and euro-denominated tokens sit at a combined supply of barely $670 million.
Put the two initiatives together — tokenized funds on Ethereum plus a bank-backed euro stablecoin — and BNP Paribas is not dabbling. It is building rails.
The Race That’s Already Running
BNP Paribas is not early to this. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, tokenized through Securitize, holds approximately $2.2 billion in US Treasuries across Ethereum, Solana, and five other chains. On February 11, BlackRock listed BUIDL on Uniswap — the first time a major asset manager made a tokenized fund tradable on a decentralized exchange. JPMorgan launched its own tokenized money market fund, MONY, on Ethereum in December 2025, seeded with $100 million. Fidelity’s Digital Interest Token crossed $250 million in November. The tokenized RWA market on Ethereum alone has grown roughly 315% year over year to exceed $17 billion, according to The Block, and the network handles about 34% of all on-chain RWA value globally.
What BNP Paribas adds is a European anchor. BlackRock, JPMorgan, and Fidelity are US firms operating under US regulatory frameworks and denominating in dollars. BNP Paribas is a euro-zone G-SIB operating under MiCA. If tokenization is going to become a transatlantic financial infrastructure rather than a US-only story, European banks need to be on-chain — and now the biggest one is.
ETH at $1,830 While Institutions Line Up
Here’s the disconnect that should make you pay attention: institutional adoption of Ethereum as settlement infrastructure is accelerating, and the price of ETH is doing the exact opposite. As of February 24, ETH is trading at roughly $1,830, down about 37% from $3,044 just a month ago. The 200-day moving average sits near $2,980 — over a thousand dollars above spot. RSI is at 30, oversold. The Fear and Greed Index reads 8.
The 52-week range tells the full story: $1,388 to $4,956. ETH is closer to its yearly low than its high, and it is getting there while BlackRock lists tokenized Treasuries on DeFi, JPMorgan builds money market funds on mainnet, and twelve European banks construct a euro stablecoin that will need Ethereum-compatible infrastructure to function. Whether the price catches up to the adoption or the adoption stalls to match the price is the question that will define the rest of 2026.
Plan accordingly.
