At the Kaiko conference in Cannes, S&P DJI and Kaiko revealed plans to tokenize the US Treasury iBoxx index in Canton, turning it into an on-chain programmable IP.
summary
- iBoxx US Treasuries is offered locally in Canton alongside DTCC’s on-chain Treasuries to support the issuance of index-linked products on the same infrastructure.
- S&P will distribute the index as a smart contract token that includes full index data, intellectual property rights, licensing terms, fees, and access controls.
- The model treats index data “like financial assets,” enabling traceability, automatic fee collection, and reusable and scalable on-chain licensing.
At the Agora Kaiko conference in Cannes on March 31, S&P Dow Jones Indices chief product and operations officer Cameron Drinkwater and Kaiko CEO Ambre Soubiran unveiled a partnership to tokenize one of S&P’s key fixed income benchmarks, the iBoxx US Treasury Index, on the Canton Network, turning the index itself into an on-chain programmable IP product rather than a simple price feed.
New Canton, Kaiko and S&P DGI have announced a partnership
“Kaiko and S&P DGI, we are now partnering to tokenize one of S&P’s largest benchmarks, the iBoxx Index, and bring it to the Canton Network,” announced Amber Soberan, CEO of Kaiko. The move follows the DTCC’s decision to bring US Treasury securities domestically to Canton (copy), which Drinkwater described as “a natural opportunity for us to also bring the iBoxx Treasury Index to Canton to give product developers or counterparties a tool to use with the physical basis also in that chain.”
Soberan stressed that this “is not limited only to publishing the index price on the network.” instead of, Standard & Poor’s It is “actually creating a smart contract token that contains all the index data,” so that clients “receive a smart contract that contains the index data but also explicitly have licensing, fees, and access control all built into the smart contract.” She frames it as “more about running the distribution rather than running the data,” offering the full index product on-chain.
Drinkwater said choosing iBoxx was a “complete no-brainer” because with DTCC placing U.S. Treasuries in Canton, “you have the foundation” and “a very active type of institutional treasury trading landscape in Canton” as well as “real demand for the iBoxx Treasury Index to use as a basis for issuing products in the Canton Series.”
IP on the chain and data as an asset
For S&P, tokenizing indices as full intellectual property products changes how licensing and economics work. “One of the great advantages of an on-chain IP issuer like us is that we actually have better auditability, better visibility into how the IP is being used, reporting on that use case and… instant reporting and potential trade based on that smart contract,” Drinkwater argued. He noted that in traditional markets, S&P “relies on delayed reporting of volumes,” which is often disputed, followed by “several months of contract settlement,” while “the entire timeline is pretty much dragging” up the chain, with “much less opportunity for dispute.”
Soberan links this to a broader shift: “The more we bring capital markets applications on-chain, the more data we bring on-chain, especially private and IP-protected data, the more we need to treat data like financial assets.” Blockchain infrastructure enables “the ability to trace data, to treat data as a financial asset, and to track where that data goes,” which is “great from an intellectual property protection standpoint” and for managing the monetization of intellectual property in financial products “programmatically,” she said.
Drawing on Kaiko’s indexes business, she noted that many index fee arrangements are tied to assets under management and turnover, with year-end settlements still “largely manual”. Moving indices on-chain allows companies to “verify on-chain the assets under management related to the financial product linked to your index or benchmark” and enable “daily fee collection based on daily trading volume.” “It’s not necessarily a new product, it’s just a new way of distributing” the current standards, she said.
Composability, evergreen and canton contracts
Both speakers highlighted mountability as a key advantage of this design. “The idea of index tokenization is for product issuers…to consume that index product locally on-chain and package it into an index-linked financial product,” Soberan explained, describing the application of composability to data products as “new and very powerful.”
Drinkwater described the architecture as multi-layered: “You can think of the token as the pointer and then the smart contract is wrapped around it and that’s the use case, the terms and conditions of the use case, audit rights, etc.” This shell “can be tailored to fit any use case customers come to us for, but then it becomes reusable. It’s evergreen. It’s on the chain.” Compared to the current model, where “customers have to come to us for every use case, it’s a new timeline for their MSA,” he said this provides “a very streamlined process for getting a new product released on-chain, dramatically accelerating timelines,” and “a reusable infrastructure that really benefits all parties.”
As for why Canton is so important, Drinkwater pointed to its ability to integrate workflows in the public and private sectors. On fully public chains like Ethereum, “those reports would be public,” which doesn’t fit “a lot of our use cases” like “private swaps… between institutions, and they don’t want that to be public.” Canton’s setup allows for reports to be “private where they need to be private, and public where they can be public, but come back to us nonetheless,” and to standardize reporting across use cases in a way that “is not the case in TradFi,” he said.
Soberan framed the broader goal as serving “almost a new addressable market which is moving your existing clients to a software infrastructure and a little bit more of an intermediation,” emphasizing that “a lot of great things are in our current financial system,” but the opportunity is to “make things more automated…more automated in moving information, moving data.”
S&P’s broader digital roadmap
Drinkwater placed the Kaiko and Canton partnership within S&P’s longer-term digital asset strategy. He noted that SPY “wasn’t SPY in its first decade, but it planted its flag,” and said S&P recognizes “the power of moving first and creating real use cases in new technology.” With a brand that is “known and trusted by institutions and retail alike,” S&P wants to “move first and early when we have conviction on new products and new technologies because we need our brand to be firmly planted out there as an established entity.”
Over the past year, S&P has “very selectively” selected “high-quality players as partners and put intellectual property on-chain where we saw discrete, very tangible use cases,” he said, citing the S&P 500 on-chain token with Centrifuge and the Digital Markets 50 index with Genari, which brings together blockchain- and cryptocurrency-exposed stocks in a structure that is “difficult to replicate in TradFi.” However, he noted that he is “very excited about the innovation we are driving today” with tokens wrapped in smart contracts that are “designed for use cases, but scalable and evergreen on-chain,” because this “opens up a lot of use cases and scalability for our IP.”
