Janus Henderson has launched the first tokenized fund licensed to replicate the Nasdaq-100 Index, trading under the ticker JQQQ. The fund uses tokenization technology from Centrifuge and operates on the Stellar blockchain. Access is currently limited to eligible non-US professional investors with at least $100,000 to commit.
What JQQQ is
The fund provides exposure to the Nasdaq-100, an index that tracks the 100 largest non-financial companies listed on the Nasdaq market. Janus Henderson emphasizes that the product is “licensed,” a distinction that matters because index providers control who can build official products around their benchmarks. Many crypto projects have offered synthetic stock exposure without such authorization. JQQQ has the necessary licensing, which the firm says is important for its institutional target audience.
The launch follows Nasdaq’s expansion of licensing opportunities for its benchmark indices in early 2026, which opened the door for this product. According to research on the launch, the goal is to combine traditional fund characteristics with blockchain efficiency, giving investors equity-index exposure within regulatory guardrails.
Janus Henderson’s onchain footprint
JQQQ is not Janus Henderson’s first onchain product. The firm already oversees over $1 billion in tokenized funds, including strategies focused on Treasuries and AAA-rated collateralized loan obligations (CLOs). A CLO bundles corporate loans into slices with different risk levels, with AAA slices at the top of the payment line. The best-known product in that lineup is the Janus Henderson Anemoy Treasury Fund, ticker JTRSY. The firm’s tokenized fund efforts began scaling significantly across 2024 and 2025 with products like it.
For context, Janus Henderson manages roughly $500 billion in total assets and 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, though 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 has 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.
