BNY Launches Digital Transfer Agency on Blockchain with Baillie Gifford's BAGEY

BNY, the world's largest custodian bank with $59 trillion in assets under custody and administration, launched its Digital Transfer Agency on July 29, 2026, moving the books and records of fund ownership onto permissionless blockchains as the authoritative record. Baillie Gifford's Enhanced Yield Fund (BAGEY), the first UK-regulated tokenized bond fund natively on Solana and Ethereum, is the first registered issuer on the new infrastructure, with Solana as one of its two co-primary chains.

Most tokenized fund products to date have used a "digital twin" model: a token on-chain that mirrors ownership records held off-chain in conventional systems. BNY's Digital TA puts the legal title and economic value directly on the blockchain as the authoritative record, per its July 29 press release. A single on-chain ownership ledger removes the reconciliation layer between token representations and legacy registers, and opens the door to peer-to-peer fund token mobility and stablecoin settlement. The service handles subscriptions and redemptions in both fiat and stablecoins through mint and burn mechanics, across multiple jurisdictions and blockchains, with initial rollout in the U.S. and U.K.

BNY's transfer agency business currently services approximately $8.6 trillion in assets across 7.6 million investor accounts, and serves 90% of Fortune 100 companies and nearly all top 100 global banks. Carolyn Weinberg, BNY's Chief Product and Innovation Officer, told CoinDesk: "We think of BNY as modernizing a function that sits behind every single fund transaction by bringing the books and records onchain."

When BAGEY launched in June, Baillie Gifford described it as the first publicly available, fully native UK-regulated tokenized fund on any public blockchain, with BNY providing custody. BNY's Digital TA formalizes the underlying infrastructure on which it operates as a registered transfer agent, with Ethereum and Solana serving as co-primary chains.

BNY Investments Dreyfus, BNY's money market unit, plans to launch BLIQUID, a digitally-native money market fund, on the same infrastructure. BlackRockBlackRock is announced as a next planned participant with BSTBL, a tokenized share class designed for stablecoin issuers managing reserve requirements.

Emily Portney, BNY's Global Head of Asset Servicing, told CoinDesk that "trillions and trillions of dollars' worth of funds will continue to exist on traditional rails," a recognition that the Digital TA runs alongside conventional transfer agency services rather than replacing them outright. Major U.S. banks are separately targeting a shared tokenized deposit network by mid-2027, according to CoinDesk, placing BNY's on-chain TA infrastructure within a wider institutional settlement picture.