Inside Apex’s Tokenization Strategy with its Global Head of Digital Assets

New tokenized hedge fund: On Tuesday, Anthony Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital announced a partnership with tokenization platform Tokeny and its parent company Apex Group to tokenize $300 million across two of its flagship hedge funds on the Avalanche blockchain.

• Why it matters: The announcement comes just three months after Apex Group, one of the world’s largest fund administrators, acquired a majority stake in Tokeny and only a couple of weeks after Apex Group unveiled its new digital assets platform Apex Digital 3.0.

Interview: We sat down with Daniel Coheur, co-founder of Tokeny and newly appointed Global Head of Digital Assets at Apex Group, to discuss the vision behind Apex Digital 3.0, how the company plans to leverage the ERC-3643 standard, and where client demand for tokenization is strongest today.

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Why the environment is now ripe for tokenization

First, let’s come back to the major news for you: why did Apex Group decide to acquire Tokeny?

As these capabilities started to mature, Peter Hughes, Apex Group’s CEO, recognized the importance of bringing them in-house and decided to acquire us at Tokeny. From Tokeny’s side, we had spent years building the technology to make regulated tokenization possible; Apex brought the servicing scale to apply it globally.

By combining Tokeny’s infrastructure with Apex’s servicing footprint, we now have both pieces of the puzzle. Apex Group works with hundreds of clients across 52 countries, and over time, we want to support tokenization for thousands of funds globally.

Because the infrastructure wasn’t ready. You could put assets onchain, but transfer agents, custodians, and fund administrators didn’t know how to process them. Asset managers who wanted to tokenize would quickly run into a wall, because their service providers couldn’t follow. That was the missing piece.

Today, this has changed. Transfer agents are now building the capability to handle onchain instruments, custodians can hold them, and administrators can integrate them into their accounting systems.

At the same time, regulators are engaging. With infrastructure, oversight, and client demand now aligned, tokenization is moving from innovation to the new standard.

This is very much part of the broader trend, and we’re excited to have SkyBridge as a client and to tokenize their two flagship funds.

They want to enable real-time transfer and tracking of investors’ access. It’s also a way for Anthony Scaramucci to link his long-standing belief in Bitcoin and blockchain with institutional-grade technology.

So with this project, we’re clearly entering a new phase of adoption, one that reflects a higher level of maturity from both a regulatory and infrastructure perspective.

Apex Digital 3.0: Building Infrastructure for Global Fund Tokenization

This fund tokenization is made possible through Apex’s platform, which was unveiled a few weeks ago. Could you explain in detail how it works?

The platform embeds compliance and servicing directly into the tokenization process, while keeping the investor experience simple.

• Investor onboarding: The first step is identity verification and KYC. Once this is complete, the investor specifies the amount they wish to commit, either in fiat or stablecoins.

• Order processing: The subscription request is routed to the asset servicer, who validates the KYC, confirms the order, and records it in the fund’s accounting system. At the same time, the custodian prepares to receive the payment. Once funds are confirmed, a token representing the investor’s interest is minted and delivered to the investor’s wallet, or to a custodian’s wallet if they use one.

• Behind the scenes: The system creates an investor ID linking the subscriber’s identity with their digital assets. If needed, a wallet can be provided through partner providers, ensuring accessibility even for those unfamiliar with blockchain. Compliance elements such as transfer restrictions, jurisdictional limits, or investor caps are embedded directly into the token, guaranteeing that any future transaction remains compliant.

For the investor, the process is as easy as using a neobank app, intuitive, digital, and fast. What sets the platform apart is how it reshapes the back office: transfer agents, custodians, and administrators remain in place but operate natively on blockchain. This ensures tokenized funds meet institutional standards and can scale beyond pilots into full adoption.

The ERC-3643 standard was designed to embed compliance directly into the token. Instead of relying on external checks, key regulatory elements are encoded on-chain:

• KYC and verified digital identity

• Investor limits and jurisdictional rules 

• Transfer restrictions

Because each investor is linked to a verified identity, assets can still be recovered even if a private key is lost.

Another key feature is the role of agents. Transfer agents, custodians, and administrators are assigned functions within the smart contract, validating transfers and enforcing rules. In practice, this ensures tokens behave like regulated instruments from day one.

For Apex, ERC-3643 is the foundation to scale tokenization across jurisdictions. It allows funds to be issued in a compliant and interoperable way, while keeping traditional actors, transfer agents, custodians, fund administrators, in their roles, now operating natively on blockchain.

The standard is also fully open source and governed by an independent industry association of around 140 members. This structure aims to foster a community of developers who can build new applications on top of it, such as:

• Collateralization protocols

• Secondary trading platforms

• Treasury and liquidity tools

• Future services not yet imagined

Until now, innovation in fund servicing was limited by legacy infrastructure. With ERC-3643, data sits on-chain, accessible and programmable, opening the door to experimentation while keeping compliance intact.

Focus for the following months

In terms of development, what are the priorities for the coming months?

Looking a bit further ahead, our focus will be on two key priorities:

• Collateralization & Secondary trading: Investors, especially LPs in private markets, need ways to unlock liquidity. Whether through collateralising their fund interests or accessing secondary markets, we are working actively to provide these capabilities. This will be a game-changer for private equity and other illiquid strategies.

• Tokenized Money Market funds & stablecoins: At the same time, we see money market funds as one of the most strategic use cases. We are upgrading our transfer agent and accounting capabilities to process subscriptions and redemptions 24/7. Combined with stablecoins, tokenized money market funds are the perfect tool for corporate treasury management, allowing cash to be placed instantly rather than waiting for traditional banking cut-off times.

Over the longer term, Apex Group has committed to tokenizing the 30,000 funds we manage worldwide within six years. That level of scale is what the market needs to move from experiments to full adoption.

With Apex Digital 3.0, our ambition is not only to tokenize assets but also to help managers raise capital by connecting them directly with liquidity providers, wealth platforms, and family offices. We also want to open the infrastructure to third-party developers and build a true ecosystem of applications around tokenized assets.

We’re exploring ways to make tokenized funds more composable within DeFi ecosystems. The challenge isn’t so much the technology as it is regulatory compliance, ownership transfers require transfer-agent approval, and every counterparty must be KYC’d and whitelisted.

That rules out anonymous liquidity pools for now, but we’re in conversations with protocols to enable compliant integrations. Over time, this could open up entirely new financing and liquidity options for tokenized products.