- Janus Henderson and Centrifuge have announced JQQQ, a fund tracking the Nasdaq-100 index, issued on the Stellar network. Centrifuge’s investment portal says subscriptions are not yet open.
- Holders get indirect economic exposure to the index’s performance. The fund’s own documentation says that is not ownership of the underlying companies.
- It is closed to US investors, limited to eligible investors elsewhere, and carries a 100,000 USDC minimum.
A $500bn asset manager has announced a Nasdaq-100 tracker on a , and the headlines have read like Apple and Nvidia shares have arrived . What has been announced is narrower than that, and the fund’s own paperwork is the thing that says so.
You can’t buy this. Nobody can yet: subscriptions aren’t open, and when they are it will be closed to US investors, restricted to eligible investors in permitted jurisdictions, with an entry ticket of 100,000 USDC. For a UK reader the useful part isn’t the product. It’s the distinction underneath it, because stocks and indices are going to keep arriving and most of them will be sold with the same word doing the same quiet work.
What JQQQ actually is
The full name is the Janus Henderson NASDAQ-100 Index Fund Segregated Portfolio, a segregated portfolio of Anemoy Capital SPC Limited, a British Virgin Islands company. Anemoy Asset Management is the investment manager, Janus Henderson Investors US LLC is sub-investment manager, Centrifuge provides the onchain infrastructure, and the token lives on Stellar and nowhere else.
It also isn’t taking money yet. The Defiant reports that Centrifuge’s own investment portal states subscriptions are not currently open, which puts JQQQ at the announcement stage rather than the operating one. That gap between launch language and an open fund is worth holding on to when you read the rest of the claims.
Nick Cherney, head of innovation at Janus Henderson, said in the announcement that the firm is “pleased to partner with Nasdaq Global Indexes and Centrifuge to launch JQQQ, combining Janus Henderson’s investment expertise with innovative digital infrastructure to meet the evolving needs of our clients”. That is a press release, and the rest of the quotes in it run the same way, including Cherney’s line that the firm is “committed to becoming the world’s most technologically sophisticated asset manager”.
Tracking a price is not owning a share
Here is the difference that the word “onchain” tends to flatten. If you buy a conventional Nasdaq-100 tracker fund, the fund buys the actual shares of the hundred companies and you own a slice of that pot. The shares exist, the fund holds them, and your claim runs through to them.
JQQQ gives holders what the release calls indirect economic exposure to the performance of an underlying investment product that tracks the index. The same document states the fund “does not constitute beneficial ownership of, nor does it convey any shareholder rights with respect to, the Nasdaq-100 Index”. Your return follows the number. Whether you get it depends on the structure and the parties standing behind it rather than on a claim to any share certificate.
That is not a scandal, and plenty of ordinary financial products work this way. It’s just a materially different thing from what “the Nasdaq-100 comes onchain” suggests.
Licensed, and what that word covers
The launch is described as the first licensed fund of its kind. The licence is Nasdaq’s: a trademark and index licence permitting the fund to track and name the Nasdaq-100. It is not a regulator approving a tokenised product.
Nasdaq’s own notes to editors in the release say the product has not been passed on as to its “legality or suitability” and is not issued, endorsed, sold or promoted by Nasdaq. Sean Wasserman, Nasdaq’s head of index product management, is quoted saying demand “continues to grow for exposure to established, transparent benchmarks”, which is the commercial case for licensing an index rather than a verdict on the vehicle.
The “first” claims throughout are the companies’ own descriptions. CoinDesk reports that Janus Henderson launched a tokenised S&P 500 fund on Coinbase’s Base network in September 2025, which gives some sense of how quickly these firsts are accumulating.
The DeFi part hasn’t happened yet
Centrifuge’s chief strategy and growth officer Anil Sood is quoted saying tokenisation “becomes much more powerful when the assets investors want to own can also become building blocks for an onchain financial system”, and the release talks about collateral, lending and programmable vaults.
None of that is live for JQQQ. The small print says any such use relates solely to functionality that may be made available by independent third parties, may not be available in all jurisdictions, and falls outside Janus Henderson’s management of the fund. It is a stated possibility, and one attached to a fund that isn’t yet accepting subscriptions.
Why the issuer-sponsored bit is the real story
The structural difference here is that the asset manager is sponsoring the product itself, rather than a third party minting tokens that mirror shares it has bought on an exchange. That matters because consent has become the live fault line in tokenised equities.
CoinDesk reports that 22 companies, Intel, and IBM among them, objected to OKX and ICE’s plans for tokenised stock trading. The objection is simple enough: a company that has not agreed to have its shares wrapped and sold on in token form has reasonable things to say about who is doing it and under what rules. A fund licensed from the index provider and run by the asset manager sidesteps that argument. It doesn’t resolve it for everyone else.
What to watch
When subscriptions open, and what size the fund reaches once they do. Centrifuge’s portal says they aren’t open now, so for the moment this is an announced fund rather than a funded one, and the two are separate events however the press release reads.
Beyond that, whether any of the promised composability arrives, and whether the objecting companies push regulators towards a consent requirement for tokenised equities. If they succeed, the issuer-sponsored route stops being one option among several and becomes the only one left.