Spiko Raises $90M Series B Led by NEA as Tokenized Cash Funds Pay the Yield Europe's Stablecoins Can't
Spiko has raised $90 million in a Series B led by NEA (New Enterprise Associates). The Paris company runs regulated money market funds whose shareholder register lives on public blockchains, and it now manages $2.7 billion in them, more than five times what it had a year ago. Most of that money arrived in the last twelve months.
Index Ventures, which led the Series A, came back for more. Bpifrance, Speedinvest, White Star Capital, Flourish Ventures and Wintermute Ventures are in the round as well, along with an angel whose name carries weight in Frankfurt and Zurich: Axel Weber, the former Bundesbank president who went on to chair UBS for ten years. Spiko has raised about $120 million since it was founded in 2023.
Over 10,000 businesses and individuals in more than 25 jurisdictions hold its funds, which come in euros, dollars, sterling and Swiss francs. Spiko’s own client list runs from startups and research institutes to public bodies, VC funds and medical practices. A doctor’s office parking cash between payroll runs is nobody’s idea of a crypto user. Spiko built the product for exactly that client. It also says its tokenized cash funds are now bigger than BlackRock’s or Franklin Templeton’s.
Europe’s Interest Ban Pushes the Yield Into Fund Shares
The rulebook explains most of this. Under MiCA, issuers of e-money tokens (the category that covers euro and dollar stablecoins in the EU) can’t pay holders interest. Exchanges and other crypto-asset service providers can’t pay it on those tokens either. The definition is wide: any reward linked to how long you hold the token counts.
So a European treasurer who moves cash on-chain as a stablecoin gets a token that settles around the clock and earns nothing. The issuer earns plenty. It parks the reserves in bank deposits and short-term government debt, keeps the income, and the law won’t let it share.
A fund share doesn’t have that problem. Money market fund units are financial instruments, so they sit outside MiCA altogether, and they pay what the underlying bills pay, minus fees. Spiko’s funds are plain French UCITS, approved by the AMF, with CACEIS as depositary. The unusual part is the register. It lives on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Polygon, Starknet and Stellar, where a conventional fund would keep it in a transfer agent’s database. The token is the share.
The US got to the same place by a different road. The GENIUS Act, signed in 2025, stops payment stablecoin issuers from paying holders interest or yield. Figure, the lender Mike Cagney co-founded and still chairs, had taken the securities route a few months before that. Its YLDS token pays a rate tied to SOFR because it’s registered with the SEC as a face-amount certificate under the Investment Company Act of 1940. It moves like a stablecoin. In law, it’s a security.
Two rulebooks, one result. If on-chain cash pays you, it’s a security.
Spiko adds an argument about time. Money market funds grew up around systems that shut at night and over the weekend, while treasury software never closes and AI agents moving money won’t keep office hours either. Spiko already pays out withdrawals instantly; next it wants yield that accrues every hour of every day. NEA’s Philip Chopin said his firm went through dozens of companies chipping away at parts of the problem, and Spiko was the only one that had cracked the regulation and the product together. The round pays for new funds and new markets, plus hiring.
Compliance Is Moving Into the Ledger
A fund share comes with strings. Only eligible investors may hold it, and a court can order it frozen. On most chains that logic lives in each issuer’s own contracts, so wallets and trading venues end up integrating products one at a time.
The Cardano Foundation said on October 7, at TOKEN2049 in Singapore, that CIP-0113, its programmable token standard, is now live on mainnet. It went through several independent security audits and didn’t need a hard fork. Issuers can build KYC and AML checks, sanctions screening, freeze-and-seize powers and transfer restrictions into a token, and the ledger itself enforces them whenever the token is transferred, minted or burned. The tokens stay native Cardano assets, so wallets and explorers handle them like any other. Rule sets come as modules an issuer can swap when regulation changes. Eternl, GeroWallet and CardanoScan backed the launch.
The endorsement issuers will care about came from Switzerland. CMTA, the Swiss association behind the CMTAT smart contract for tokenized securities, now accepts CIP-113 tokens as equivalent to CMTAT for certification. For a European fund or bond issuer choosing a chain, that’s a box ticked by a body its lawyers already know.
There’s a catch, and it’s in the design. A freeze on one asset can temporarily tie up unrelated tokens held in the same transaction output, which is why the reference implementation prefers outputs that carry a single token policy. A regulated issuer can design around that. A DeFi protocol that pools many tokens in one place will find it harder.
Custody and Distribution Are Catching Up
BitGo and HashKey Cloud announced their own deal in Singapore on October 6. It turns a staking arrangement from July into a partnership for institutional clients in Asia-Pacific that also covers trading, custody and real-world asset tokenization. The tokenization piece is plumbing: BitGo becomes the custody partner for HashKey’s tokenization projects and will offer custody to HashKey Capital’s funds. HashKey brings a regulated base in Hong Kong. BitGo, now listed on the NYSE, brings a custodian that compliance teams already sign off on. A tokenized security with no approved place to sit doesn’t get bought.
Navra works the other end, the person or company deciding where the money goes. Mike Cagney’s new startup closed an oversubscribed $19 million Series A led by Ribbit, with Baseline, DCM, Jump Crypto and Figure Technology Solutions also investing. Cagney’s view is that DeFi protocols are the best foundation for the $6 trillion asset-based finance market, yet real dollars still haven’t moved onto them. He names the obstacles as user experience, keyless qualified custody and enterprise control, and says Navra handles all of them.
Navra’s product is one AI-native screen over a curated set of on-chain venues. Retail users get DeFi yield, trading, an embedded agent and keyless self-custody; institutions get wallet management with role-based permissions, qualified custody and full audit trails. Figure is the first named partner. Navra will plug into Figure’s Democratized Prime lending protocol and into YLDS, the registered dollar token from earlier. Figure’s CEO says its ecosystem now puts more than $2 billion of real-world assets on-chain every month, and he wants DeFi to finance them. A small group of design partners gets access in late October, with white-label versions after that.
Put the four stories side by side and the chains start to look like pipes. Cardano, Ethereum, Stellar and the rest compete to carry the assets, while the value collects one layer up, with whoever is licensed to pay the yield. In Europe that layer already has a legal shape, because MiCA drew it. Spiko’s $90 million is a bet on owning it for euros, sterling and Swiss francs.
MiCA picked the wrapper. Spiko wants to be the name on it.