The latest Cayman Islands Monetary Authority data shows nine tokenised investment funds registered in Cayman, following legislative changes in March.
The information, which isn’t publicly available on the CIMA website but emerged following an information request from Cayman Finance, shows that investment funds are beginning to respond to Cayman’s move to update tokenisation legislation.
Despite the tech-sounding name, a tokenised fund doesn’t refer to the actual investment focus of the fund itself. Tokenisation involves funds using blockchain technology to handle aspects of fund administration and settlement. It sees funds using blockchain to improve their infrastructure – for example recordkeeping, transfer controls, settlement processes and investor onboarding – but the underlying legal ownership and investor rights remain unchanged as they are linked to the token.
Experts are particularly interested in the potential for blockchain-enabled smart contracts to allow equity holders to have more options with their tokens than they would with a share in a traditional fund.
In March, Parliament passed the Mutual Funds (Amendment) Bill, 2026, Private Funds (Amendment) Bill, 2026 and the Virtual Asset (Service Providers) (Amendment) Bill, 2026. Cayman already had tokenised funds but they weren’t officially registered, so the new legislative framework provides certainty.
“The new clarity in the legislation that came in when the Government adopted amendments to the Mutual Funds Act and the Private Funds Act around tokenisation introduced a meaningful shift,” said Matthew Taber, a professional independent director at Leeward. “Funds such as BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, had previously looked to the BVI in the absence of a clear Cayman framework and we expect a number of those structures to now consider or reconsider Cayman.”
The underlying reason, said Taber, is that Cayman “remains the undisputed leader of the offshore funds world”. According to data from CIMA, Cayman already hosts more than 30,000 investment funds with US$16 trillion in total assets.
“Combined with the breadth and depth of the professional community around Web3 and tokenisation in Cayman, the case is a compelling one,” said Taber. “I sit on the boards of tokenised fund structures and Leeward provides governance services to a large range of non-fund real-world asset tokenisation projects, so we are seeing strong interest in this space firsthand, which can only be a good thing for the jurisdiction.”
Potential for growth in tokenised funds
The current number of nine tokenised funds is inconsequential in Cayman’s fund landscape. The bigger question is whether Cayman will succeed in attracting more. Taber warns against complacency. “Tokenisation remains a genuinely complex part of the financial services industry, and it is crucial that sponsors and investors engage with service providers and governance professionals who can demonstrate real expertise rather than asserting it.”
Anthony Travers, senior partner at Travers Thorp Alberga agrees that tokenisation of real world assets involves a different level of complexity. “It is not particularly difficult to create and arrange for the issue of a non-fungible token of a Drunken Ape,” said Travers. “However, arranging for the integration of a smart contract representing an intangible right in digital form to a real-world asset, such as a fund, a securitisation vehicle or the asset directly requires a much higher level of legal understanding and sophistication.”
Haymond Rankin, associate director for banking, fintech and virtual assets at Cayman Finance, is optimistic. “The nine tokenised funds now registered in Cayman tell us where the funds industry is heading. Tokenisation is changing how fund interests are issued and transferred, and the institutional pipeline is growing accordingly.
“The March 2026 amendments gave managers something they had been missing: a clear statutory route for tokenised fund structures, without the dual-licensing risk that had been slowing decisions. With the new framework now in place, Cayman’s depth in fund management, virtual assets and tax-neutral structuring puts the jurisdiction in an even stronger position as institutional adoption of tokenisation grows.”
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