New Corporate Cash Accounts on Wall Street

Article Author: Prathik Desai Article Compiled by Block unicorn

On June 9, the London-based asset management firm Janus Henderson (Ethena’s partner, Ethena being the crypto company behind the USDe stablecoin) signed a four-part agreement. Under the agreement, this asset manager, which oversees $480 billion in assets, agreed to allocate one of its own funds into a reserve supporting the digital dollar, whose circulating supply is $5.5 billion. In addition, the company agreed to bundle Ethena’s products for sale to its clients and to invest its corporate cash in USDe.

Janus is not an exception. Over the past four months, the two largest asset managers in the world—BlackRock and Apollo—have also taken similar actions in different areas of crypto protocols. The total assets managed by these three companies exceed $150 trillion.

In today’s article, I will explain why Wall Street heavyweights are buying stakes in crypto companies—and what returns the crypto companies can gain from it.

Traditional Finance and Crypto Transactions

Let’s first look at what Ethena and Janus can gain from this latest deal. Ethena has added Janus Henderson’s tokenized credit fund into its USDe reserve. This move reinforces Ethena’s recent attempts to adjust its USDe reserve collateral portfolio.

In my article “When Yields Dry Up,” I explained how Ethena diversified its collateral to cover both traditional assets and crypto assets. Previously, Ethena’s reserve strategy relied entirely on yield from crypto-supported basis trading and treasury bills—but this strategy failed during periods of market weakness.

Janus’s AAA-rated fund is one of the safest components among corporate loan pools. Funds of this type have the lowest default risk and the highest priority regarding the receipt of interest and principal. Ethena’s risk committee has approved this fund as a qualified collateral portfolio component. This will mark the first time USDe is backed by actual corporate credit instruments.

As part of the transaction, Janus also did three things. It acquired Ethena’s governance token ENA through its blockchain company ANTIK. It agreed to co-develop a regulated exchange-traded product (ETP/ETF) for USDe with Ethena in the second half of 2026. This will allow ordinary investors to buy Ethena dollars through ordinary securities accounts without having to open a crypto wallet. Finally, Janus said it will hold USDe and its yield-bearing version sUSDe as part of its own funds.

For Janus, Ethena’s demand for its tokenized credit fund is now stable and steady. Since Janus’s credit fund is currently used as USDe’s reserve, every time Ethena issues one additional dollar of USDe, it must buy more reserve assets, including JAAA. This excess inflow into Janus’s credit fund does not require Janus to do any marketing.

In return, the asset management firm becomes a customer of this protocol’s dollar—gaining governance rights by purchasing ENA tokens—and doubles down with additional investment, turning it into a distributor of both of the firm’s traditional products.

Two other fund managers also reached similar deals four months ago. BlackRock bought an undisclosed amount of Uniswap tokens UNI, and also launched its tokenized treasury fund BUIDL on the Uniswap platform. However, BUIDL’s access is limited to only large qualified investors and approved market makers. Apollo Global Management signed an agreement to purchase up to 90 million MORPHO tokens—about one-tenth of the total supply—while building a lending market on the Morpho platform, using its own credit fund as collateral.

A small investment by an asset management firm into a crypto protocol might be seen as “testing the waters.” But what we are discussing now is that three of the most well-known asset management firms are buying the protocol’s tokens and integrating their products into the blockchain ecosystem.

But why are these governance tokens? There are two reasons.

Traditional finance’s view of investing in crypto has undergone a 180-degree shift. A few years ago, the instinct was to invest in crypto as much as possible, but without directly touching the underlying infrastructure. They chose to hold crypto through tokenized funds, custodians, or ETP products.

But as use cases for crypto infrastructure continue to evolve, the notion of where its value lies has been significantly redefined. The rise of stablecoins and the tokenization of real-world assets have shown traditional finance participants that on-chain financial operations can reduce operating costs drastically. In the past, tasks such as settling transactions, holding assets, and recording ownership were cumbersome and expensive, requiring someone to charge high fees. Now, the cost of these tasks has dropped sharply—almost to the cost of running software.

Once infrastructure becomes commoditized, value shifts to the layer that determines how data flows, sets the rules, and distributes products. Whoever controls this layer can capture the value flowing through it. Currently, the simplest way for traditional finance giants is to buy shares in crypto infrastructure protocols that control this layer. Since protocols like Uniswap or Ethena do not have traditional equity shares available for purchase, their governance tokens provide Wall Street with the closest alternative to owning company shares.

Another reason is that holding shares creates stable market demand. When someone needs USDe, they must pledge an equivalent amount of USD as collateral for Ethena to issue the stablecoin. Ethena then needs to deposit the received collateral into reserve assets to support its new issuance of dollars. JAAA is now one of the assets Ethena is authorized to hold, so as the USDe supply grows, some of the new collateral flows into Janus’s fund. This excess demand is a byproduct of USDe expansion, requiring no marketing effort from Janus.

Apollo and BlackRock have also made similar moves with Morpho and Uniswap, respectively. In both cases, the fund managers hold tokens, offer products, and can then channel funds into the protocol. More capital means greater demand for the funds the managers have just integrated.

For Wall Street, owning a crypto “rail” system for infrastructure allows them to control reserves, capture distribution rights, and use blockchain to fund their products at extremely low cost.

What benefits does it bring to protocols?

Two words: scalable distribution.

For Ethena, Janus has opened its distribution network to users who would never otherwise open a crypto wallet or access crypto protocols. The ETP and ETF co-developed by Janus and Ethena will allow advisors to buy Ethena’s products without having to understand blockchain. Janus manages assets totaling $480 billion—nearly 100 times the tens of billions of dollars in assets Ethena manages.

A few weeks ago, Ethena reached a similar agreement with Coinbase, further expanding its distribution reach.

On June 2, Coinbase Ventures acquired ENA and agreed to launch a savings product for Coinbase’s more than 100 million users.

Coinbase’s USDC ecosystem already holds about $19 billion in assets. If Ethena’s yield is even slightly higher than USDC, Coinbase can allocate some of its idle USDC balances into Ethena’s products to offer users a higher yield—while Ethena gains more capital and broader circulation.

Just four days after launch, the USDe circulating supply in Coinbase Vaults surpassed $100 million.

Distribution also helps raise funds at lower costs to run its yield mechanisms. By absorbing a portion of the $19 billion in exchange balances—or by tapping into part of the manager-client base with $480 billion in assets under management—Ethena can reduce the marginal cost of expanding its circulation. For a protocol whose current circulating supply is $5.5 billion, even a 1% conversion rate of Janus’s $480 billion in assets would nearly double Ethena’s base.

But why would Wall Street firms hold stablecoins instead of ordinary money market funds?

With Janus’s AAA-rated lending fund incorporated into Ethena’s reserve strategy, the structure backing USDe now looks more like a traditional cash investment portfolio. The reserve currently holds short-term, high-grade collateral, along with more stable basis trading centered on commodities such as gold. This makes the reserve quite similar to a money market fund managed as part of a corporate treasury strategy—over decades.

Janus’s additional step—holding USD itself as Treasury-bill cash—shows confidence that the asset manager can defend the dollar for Ethena using this new collateral mix. Even BlackRock and Apollo have not taken this approach with Uniswap and Morpho.

But there are a few points to be cautious about.

First, staking USDe does not guarantee yield. Returns depend on a series of trades on exchanges and market conditions. AAA credit risk is lower, but it is not zero; the 2008 financial crisis proved that.

Second, the governance tokens purchased by Wall Street firms in these protocols currently do not pay any dividends to token holders. Ethena’s fee conversion mechanism (designed to distribute protocol revenue to ENA holders) reached the expected conditions in September 2025, but it has not yet been implemented.

Therefore, Janus, BlackRock, and Apollo currently have no rights to any cash flows. In effect, they are buying a right to future revenue—once the protocol decides to pay them, they will receive those proceeds. Morpho’s fee conversion mechanism has also been shut down, and Uniswap’s fee conversion mechanism is only about halfway complete.

However, these companies have still achieved two major wins so far.

First, through collaboration with blockchain protocols, they can create stable demand for their products. Second, they can seize early opportunities and position themselves advantageously in areas where value is emerging. By investing in blockchain products, these firms are also effectively buying a portion of the expected future earnings that these products generate once they are widely adopted across the broader financial market.

BlackRock, Apollo, and Janus are not the first institutions to recognize that potential infrastructure can create value.

We have been discussing this model in previous articles.

Before Merrill Lynch split accounts and paid market-rate returns to depositors, banks were merely institutions that accepted deposits. After that, other banks followed suit.

Before exchanges were forced to transform into price discovery platforms through vertical integration, they were essentially trading venues. Today, all exchanges have become (or are becoming) places that offer perpetual contracts, pre-IPO markets, and prediction markets—all centralized on a single platform.

Synthetics dollars is the latest bottleneck to have been broken through. The dollar, its circulation layer, and the reserves backing it are being layered, and whoever controls each layer best owns the value. As Ethena rebuilds its reserve, institutions like BlackRock are providing distribution channels. Wall Street sees that infrastructure fees have almost fallen to zero and is now deciding how to control the issuance of digital dollars.

When you strip this phenomenon down to its most fundamental principles, you’ll find that these asset management firms are essentially buying stakes in a crypto protocol—doing something fundamentally identical to what companies like BlackRock and Apollo have been doing for decades. They are buying shares in a blockchain-based platform that still holds and transfers assets (meaning stablecoins), and aims to maximize asset yield for holders. Isn’t that the classic asset management model?