Allfunds receives more than 4,000 faxes every single day. Ruben Nieto offered that number without hesitation, and it reframes the entire tokenization debate. The industry keeps asking whether smart contracts are ready for institutional volume. Meanwhile, paper still rolls out of machines inside fund operations teams across Europe.
Nieto runs Allfunds Blockchain, the digital assets arm of the largest fund distribution platform in the world. Allfunds connects more than 3,300 asset managers and financial institutions. It supports close to €1.8 trillion in assets under administration as of March 2026. That network spans more than 900 distributor contracts across 66 countries.
On June 23, 2026, Allfunds Blockchain announced it would expand tokenized funds to Solana. The vehicle is called Project Harmonia. It is anchored by Allfunds Blockchain, the Solana Foundation, ioBuilders, and Particula. Nieto spoke with Genfinity’s Ryan Solomon about what the initiative actually asks of the industry.
Solana Exclusive 🏦 Allfunds. $2T. 3,300+ Asset Managers & Institutions. The Future of Fund Distribution.
— Generation Infinity (@Genfinity) August 18, 2026
"Tokenization without distribution is just digitalization." — Ruben Nieto, Managing Director of Allfunds Blockchain
Genfinity Founder @IOV_OWL sat down with Ruben to… pic.twitter.com/lZnJL4zy0Y
A software company inside a distribution platform
Nieto has worked at Allfunds for almost twenty years. That tenure matters, because it shapes how he describes the company’s original bet. Allfunds launched in Spain in 2000 as a spin-off from Banco Santander. At the time, big banks mostly distributed their own products to their own clients.
Allfunds pushed open architecture instead. The goal was simple in both directions. Any asset manager should reach any distribution channel. Additionally, any bank, insurer, or private bank should reach any product issued anywhere in the world. That two-way promise built the platform over the following two decades.
Allfunds Blockchain arrived later, as a separate company inside the group. The team started studying the technology around 2018. It then stood up its own private, permissioned network roughly six years ago. Nieto is careful about the label he uses. “We are a software company,” he said, helping the main industry players adopt the technology rather than replacing them.
Tokenised funds have moved from pilots to production, and distribution is the last barrier. Project Harmonia brings them to Solana through Allfunds' network of 3,300+ asset managers.
— Solana (@solana) August 5, 2026
"A project that is going to completely transform the way the industry works for the next 100… pic.twitter.com/tx8hXlKWm1
The efficiency case, and the bigger one
Nieto splits the tokenization opportunity into two angles. The first is the obvious one. Manual fund dealing costs money, introduces errors, and cannot scale. Smart contracts automate the steps that faxes and files handle today.
That angle matters most in private markets. Private asset volume has grown quickly over the past two years. Evergreen funds and semi-liquid products now reach retail investors in some jurisdictions. However, you cannot serve that audience without near-total automation. The operational load simply breaks at retail ticket sizes.
The second angle interests him more. Distribution is what Allfunds sells, so distribution is what tokenization has to unlock. In an onchain context, that word covers decentralized exchanges, collateral systems, and treasury management tools. Consequently, the company now wants to extend that reach into public networks too.
Nieto is blunt about the ranking. “Tokenization without distribution is just digitalization,” he said. Digitizing a fax is progress. Reaching a new buyer base is a business.
Why Solana, and what “one single industry” means
Solana has spent the past two years accumulating institutional fund activity. Franklin Templeton launched BENJI on the network in February 2025. BlackRock’s BUIDL holds a substantial position there through Securitize. WisdomTree expanded its tokenized fund suite to Solana in January 2026. State Street and Galaxy launched the SWEEP liquidity fund on it in May 2026.
Nieto watched that pattern and identified the gap. Each of those launches required a bilateral negotiation. Every asset manager had to build its own path onto the network, one relationship at a time. Solana wants scale, and Allfunds already holds the distribution graph that produces scale. As a result, the two sides landed on a shared framework instead of another one-off integration.
He describes the goal with a phrase he repeats often. Project Harmonia exists to create “one single industry.” Under that model, an asset manager stops picking between a DeFi audience and a traditional one. The same product reaches both. Meanwhile, Allfunds banks, private banks, and insurers gain access to funds issued natively on Solana.
The architecture keeps existing workflows intact. Subscription, transfer, and fund administration stay connected to regulated Allfunds processes. ioBuilders supplies the integration layer through its Asseto platform, which handles issuance and lifecycle management onchain. Particula applies an independent risk assessment framework across economic, legal, operational, and technical dimensions.
The part that is not software
Nieto spent much of the conversation arguing that Harmonia is not primarily a technical product. He accepts the technical work as a given. The harder deliverable is an industry standard that the participants write together.
The open questions are specific and unresolved. Who performs KYC and anti-money laundering checks in an onchain distribution chain? What can a holder actually do with a token representing units of a private fund? Can that token trade on a secondary market? Furthermore, what happens to the KYC record when ownership changes hands there?
He returns repeatedly to a point institutions need to hear clearly. Tokenizing a fund does not change what the fund is. “When you tokenize a financial product, a mutual fund, a private fund, it remains a mutual fund,” he said. The responsibilities and the applicable law stay identical. A supervisor still watches the product.
That framing sets the agenda for the participants. Custodians, transfer agents, and asset managers have to define their obligations in front of a decentralized exchange. Nobody has written those answers down yet. Harmonia is the table where Nieto expects the industry to write them.
120 registrations before the RFP even opened
Allfunds published the Project Harmonia site with one button on it. The button requested more information. There was no aggressive campaign behind it, and the formal process had not started.
More than 120 institutions clicked it and completed registration. Each one submitted names and platform details. Nieto had expected the early recruitment phase to be the hard part, so the response surprised him. Notably, the interest arrived from both directions. Asset managers want Web3 distribution, and Web3 platforms want tokenized products to sit alongside stablecoins in their apps.
The timeline he laid out is deliberately compressed. The RFP opens in September 2026, which converts interest into commitment. The solution should go live before the end of this year. First-wave institutions get announced before Christmas. Then the team plans jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction expansion through 2027 with the Solana Foundation.
Solomon asked whether participation compounds. Nieto agreed that a flywheel is the intent. Each institution that joins reduces the effort for the next one. The standards and the counterparties already exist by then.
Global distribution is the actual product
The strategic pitch has little to do with local markets. Nieto used Spain and Italy to explain why. A Spanish investor buying a Spanish fund needs no tokenization at all. That trade works today, and a token adds nothing beyond removing a fax.
The interesting flows run the other way. Allfunds wants Spanish clients reaching globally issued funds. Equally, it wants Italian asset managers reaching buyers they cannot see today. He offered a concrete scenario. A platform in Indonesia might want exposure to Italy. A tokenized fund becomes the practical way to deliver it.
That ambition drags stablecoins into the discussion immediately. Real-time execution and settlement require a settlement asset that moves at the same speed. The United States leads that market clearly. However, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East each present different answers. European central banks are still debating their own issuance. Harmonia has to accommodate all of it, because Allfunds already distributes in 66 countries.
What asset managers actually build first
Solomon asked whether entirely new products emerge from this shift. Nieto’s answer separates the near term from the eventual one.
Right now, managers stay conservative. The common first step is a tokenized share class of an existing fund. The alternative is a tokenized feeder fund that invests into a product already running. Both approaches avoid heavy investment in product creation. In his words, firms want to check whether the water is cold or hot before committing.
He expects that caution to end once distribution matures. New buyers will demand products designed for how they operate. He gave one example that Web3 treasury desks would recognize instantly. Consider a US Treasury bill fund with same-day settlement, running 24/7. Corporate treasury desks could use it inside their systems in real time. Nothing in the traditional catalog does that job.
Nieto ties the shift to something larger than product design. Client expectations are changing across the whole market, and the investment experience has to change with them. Asset managers therefore need to think seriously about a client segment that did not exist a decade ago.
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