UBS launched its first tokenized investment fund on Ethereum

UBS Asset Management launched the UBS USD Money Market Investment Fund Token, or uMINT, on November 1, 2024. The bank described it as its first tokenized investment fund: a money-market investment built on Ethereum distributed-ledger technology and made available through authorized distribution partners.

The development mattered because UBS was moving a regulated asset-management product from experimentation into client-facing distribution. Rather than creating a cryptocurrency with no off-chain claim, uMINT used a blockchain token as the access and record-keeping layer for a fund backed by conventional money-market instruments. It placed Ethereum infrastructure inside an institutional cash-management product while leaving the underlying investment mandate under UBS Asset Management.

What UBS put into production

UBS said tokenholders could access its institutional cash-management capabilities, underpinned by what the bank called high-quality money-market instruments managed within a conservative, risk-controlled framework. The November 1 announcement did not identify the individual instruments, publish a portfolio, disclose assets under management, or give the token’s contract address.

The bank also did not disclose the minimum subscription, fees, yield, number of investors, or value issued. Those omissions limit what can be concluded from “launch.” The primary record establishes product availability through authorized partners; it does not establish broad adoption, secondary-market liquidity, or a particular financial return.

DigiFT identified itself in a separate company announcement as an authorized distributor. It said investors could subscribe using supported custody-wallet arrangements and obtain real-time redemption access through its platform. DigiFT also said it would manage and monitor on-chain distribution activity and transactions. Those operational descriptions were claims by a participating company, not independently audited performance measurements.

Contemporaneous specialist reporting said it had confirmed that uMINT was issued on Ethereum’s public mainnet. UBS’s launch notice itself said only that the product was built on Ethereum distributed-ledger technology, while describing the bank’s broader strategy as spanning both public and private blockchain networks. The public-mainnet detail should therefore be treated as independently reported clarification, not language contained in the launch notice.

From pilot to distributed product

The launch followed a controlled UBS Asset Management pilot announced on October 2, 2023 under the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Project Guardian. That pilot represented a tokenized Variable Capital Company fund as a smart contract on Ethereum’s public blockchain and tested functions including subscriptions and redemptions.

By November 1, 2024, UBS framed uMINT as part of a longer institutional tokenization program. Its launch record pointed to CNH 200 million of fully digital structured notes originated for a third-party issuer in June 2023 and a cross-border repurchase transaction involving a natively issued digital bond in November 2023.

The CNH 200 million figure measures the face amount of that earlier structured-note issuance. It is not uMINT’s launch size and provides no basis for estimating the new fund’s assets. Likewise, the earlier pilots and transactions demonstrated specific workflows; they did not prove that tokenization reduced cost, risk, or settlement time for uMINT.

What November 1 established

The narrow verified conclusion is that UBS Asset Management had launched a tokenized money-market investment built on Ethereum and opened access through authorized distributors. The architecture connected blockchain-based issuance and distribution with conventional managed cash instruments, marking a progression from UBS’s earlier fund pilot.

Important questions remained unresolved on November 1: how much capital entered the fund, which assets it held, who could subscribe, how redemption performed under stress, and whether the tokenized structure produced measurable efficiencies. No event-day evidence reviewed for this reconstruction supports a claim that uMINT materially affected ether’s price, Ethereum network activity, or the wider money-market-fund industry.