Janus Henderson has launched the first tokenized fund licensed to replicate the Nasdaq-100 Index. It trades under the ticker JQQQ.
The fund uses tokenization technology from Centrifuge and lives on the Stellar blockchain. For now, access is limited to eligible non-US professional investors with at least $100,000 to commit.
What JQQQ actually is
The underlying exposure is the Nasdaq-100. That index tracks the 100 largest non-financial companies listed on the Nasdaq market.
The key word in Janus Henderson’s pitch is “licensed.” Index providers control who can build official products around their benchmarks. Plenty of crypto projects have offered synthetic stock exposure over the years without that blessing.
JQQQ has the paperwork. That distinction matters a lot to the institutional crowd this fund is targeting.
The timing ties back to Nasdaq itself. In early 2026, the exchange operator expanded licensing opportunities for its benchmark indices, which opened the door for this launch.
The goal, according to the research on the launch, is to pair traditional fund characteristics with blockchain efficiency. Investors get equity-index exposure while the product stays within regulatory guardrails.
Janus Henderson’s growing onchain footprint
This is not the firm’s first onchain product. Janus Henderson already oversees over $1 billion in tokenized funds, including strategies focused on Treasuries and AAA-rated collateralized loan obligations, or CLOs.
A CLO bundles corporate loans into slices with different risk levels. The AAA slices sit at the top of the payment line.
The best-known product in that lineup is the Janus Henderson Anemoy Treasury Fund, which goes by JTRSY. The firm’s tokenized fund efforts began scaling significantly across 2024 and 2025 with products like it.
For context, the company manages roughly $500 billion in total assets.
Janus Henderson also has approximately 200 crypto wallets onboarded to its platform.
Why the move from bonds to stocks matters
JQQQ extends Janus Henderson’s tokenized efforts into equity-index exposure.
The research suggests tokenized funds like JQQQ could eventually offer enhanced liquidity and fractional ownership of large-cap equities. Those are potential benefits, not guaranteed ones.
A $100,000 minimum and a professional-only investor base mean the fractional-ownership dream is not arriving for retail just yet.
What this means for Stellar, Centrifuge, and the tokenization race
For Centrifuge, JQQQ adds an equity product to its portfolio of real-world asset work. The tokenization platform has positioned itself as plumbing for institutional funds rather than a consumer-facing brand.
For Stellar, the launch places a recognizable Wall Street benchmark on its network. Stellar has long pitched itself as infrastructure for payments and regulated assets, and a licensed Nasdaq-100 product fits neatly into that story.
A third question is whether other index providers follow Nasdaq in loosening licensing terms. Without the license, an onchain index product is effectively a knockoff. With it, the product can carry a name that institutional allocators already trust.
Janus Henderson already proved it could attract over $1 billion to tokenized bond and credit strategies. JQQQ tests whether that playbook works when the underlying asset is a basket of the biggest names on the Nasdaq.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Vivian Nguyen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.