Mantle Index Four Fund (MI4)

Rejected venues wait the longest for re-review; a rejection has to earn another look before the scheduled date.

REJECTED ON ACCESS AND MISCLASSIFICATION RISK. MI4 is not a tokenized treasury or money-market product despite sitting in this backlog’s issuer/RWA queue — it is a crypto-native, market-cap-weighted digital-asset index fund holding BTC, ETH, and SOL with a staking and restaking yield overlay (Mantle’s mETH, Bybit’s bbSOL, Ethena’s sUSDe), explicitly marketed as ”the crypto equivalent to the S&P 500.” Confusing this for a stable-NAV treasury product would misstate the risk to a client. Independent of that classification issue, the fund is a BVI limited partnership restricted to non-US persons under Regulation S or US accredited investors under Regulation D, with a $100,000 minimum subscription — the same access bar already applied to BUIDL, USYC, Ondo Global Markets, and Anemoy/JTRSY in this registry. On-chain figures also show only 6 holders against a roughly $117.6M tracked balance, an extreme concentration this review treats as a real counterparty and liquidity consideration distinct from smart-contract risk.

Kill criteria: the events that revoke this verdict
• A US-eligible offering opens to this registry’s target client population
• The on-chain tracked balance reconciles with the fund’s reported total AUM, or the discrepancy is explained from a primary source
• Holder concentration diversifies meaningfully beyond the current 6 holders
• This entry’s crypto-index classification is confirmed to remain distinct from any stable-NAV treasury product comparison in advisor-facing materials

The research file

Mechanism

MI4 holds BTC, ETH, and SOL market-cap-weighted, with the non-BTC legs staked or restaked for additional yield: Mantle’s own mETH liquid restaking token for the ETH allocation, Bybit’s bbSOL for the SOL allocation, and Ethena’s sUSDe for the USD/stablecoin sleeve. The portfolio rebalances quarterly using a rules-based, market-cap-and-risk-weighted methodology. This is a volatile, crypto-beta product with an active yield overlay, not a stable-NAV cash-equivalent instrument, and should not be compared to or substituted for a tokenized treasury fund in a client allocation.

Legal structure

MI4 is structured as a British Virgin Islands limited partnership, managed by Mantle Guard Ltd. (established specifically for this fund), with Securitize, LLC as tokenization partner, Securitize Fund Services, LLC as administrator, Securitize Markets, LLC as transfer agent, KPMG as auditor, and OSL Digital Securities Limited as crypto-asset custodian with bankruptcy-remote account segregation. Mantle Treasury committed up to $400M as anchor investor at launch (announced 2025-04-24). This is genuine institutional-grade infrastructure — the same Securitize stack BlackRock uses for BUIDL — but that credibility applies to the compliance plumbing, not to the underlying crypto-market-beta risk the fund actually carries.

Eligibility

Access is restricted to non-US persons under Regulation S or US accredited investors under Regulation D, with all investors additionally required to qualify as ”professional investors” under the BVI Securities and Investment Business Act 2010. The minimum subscription is $100,000 USDC. This access structure independently disqualifies MI4 for a broad US mass-affluent client base regardless of the fund’s other characteristics, consistent with this registry’s treatment of every comparable Reg D/Reg S tokenized fund.

Control, redemption, and concentration

The token is built on Securitize’s DS Protocol, which by design includes issuer- and transfer-agent-level freeze and unfreeze capability and a compliance service that evaluates every proposed transfer against accreditation, jurisdiction, and investor-count rules — standard across Securitize’s book, though not separately confirmed in an MI4-specific disclosure. Subscriptions and redemptions process weekly, with a one-month hold period after subscription before redemption is permitted and potential further delays under adverse market conditions; the management fee is 1.00% annually with no disclosed performance or transaction fee. Current on-chain data shows only 6 holders against a roughly $117.6M balance — an extreme concentration consistent with an anchor-investor-dominated cap table, which this review flags as a liquidity and counterparty-concentration risk distinct from the fund’s market risk.

Track record and comparison

MI4 launched April 2025 and reported roughly $173M in AUM with a 27.9% year-to-date return as of 2025-12-31 — a return figure that reflects crypto market performance over that period, not a stable yield. The current on-chain tracked figure (~$117.6M) does not reconcile against that reported year-end AUM in any source found, which this review treats as an open item rather than an incident. No security incident was found. Against BlackRock BUIDL or Franklin Templeton’s BENJI, both stable-NAV treasury products, MI4 is not a substitutable comparison — it belongs in a crypto-index-fund peer set, not a cash-management peer set, and this registry records that distinction explicitly so it is never conflated in an advisor-facing explanation.

Sources

The claims above trace to these. Where a number could not be independently verified, the thesis says so.

• Chainwire — Mantle Index Four (MI4) Fund launches with Securitize as tokenization partner · primary · accessed 2026-08-17
  Supports: fund structure, anchor investor commitment, Securitize service providers
• RWA.xyz — MI4 asset page · secondary · accessed 2026-08-17
  Supports: current on-chain AUM, holder count, minimum subscription, redemption cadence and hold period, custodian
• 4Pillars Research — Mantle MI4, the crypto index that earns · secondary · accessed 2026-08-17
  Supports: index composition, staking and restaking yield overlay
• Securitize Medium — DS Protocol v4 · primary · accessed 2026-08-17
  Supports: freeze and compliance transfer restriction design
• DefiLlama — Mantle Index Four Fund protocol data · secondary · accessed 2026-08-17
  Supports: on-chain tracked TVL confirmation

Inherited controls

The verdict above grades the protocol layer. Every position also inherits the asset it holds and the chain it settles on. The least safe layer sets the position’s grade, and the position table names which one that is.