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tokenized-rwa

Spiko (EUTBL / USTBL)

Rejected
Max sleeve
Reviewed
2026-08-17 · v1
Next review
2026-11-17
Research basis
Individual research
Chains
Stellar · freezable, Arbitrum One · hybrid, Ethereum · sovereign, Polygon PoS · hybrid, Base · hybrid, Starknet · hybrid
Symbols
EUTBL USTBL

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

REJECTED ON UNVERIFIED US-PERSON ACCESS, NOT ON FUND QUALITY. Spiko runs two genuine UCITS-compliant money-market sub-funds (EUTBL, USTBL) inside the AMF-authorized Spiko SICAV (registry SCV20240012, authorized 2024-04-05), managed by Twenty First Capital under an existing AMF license (GP-11000029). That is a real EU retail-fund regime, not a Reg D private placement, and its on-chain control model — a permission-managed contract with a super-admin multisig, allowlist gating, and a pause function — is disclosed at the engineering level. But this is a French, AMF-regulated retail fund, and its own Terms of Use reserve ”the right to refuse access… to residents of countries not eligible,” which implies a jurisdiction allowlist or blocklist this review could not extract from the published PDF. EU retail funds routinely exclude US persons entirely to avoid US securities and tax-registration entanglements (PFIC treatment for a US taxpayer holding a foreign fund is a live problem even where technically permitted). This registry serves US mass-affluent clients, and every comparable tokenized-fund entry in this backlog that explicitly excludes US persons — Ondo Global Markets, Anemoy/JTRSY, and previously BUIDL and USYC — is rejected on that access ground rather than assumed accessible. Spiko gets the same treatment until its eligibility rules are confirmed to cover this client population.

The research file

Mechanism and fund structure

Spiko is a French fintech, founded June 2023, operating two UCITS-compliant, variable-NAV money market sub-funds inside the Spiko SICAV: EUTBL (short Eurozone government T-bills) and USTBL (100% US Treasury bills, T-bill-secured repo, and cash). Tokens are on-chain representations of fund shares, deployed across Stellar (the majority of activity), Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Polygon, Starknet, and Etherlink. The SICAV was authorized by the AMF on 2024-04-05 under registry SCV20240012, with Twenty First Capital, an AMF-licensed management company since 2011, as manager. This is a genuinely regulated retail fund vehicle, not a synthetic wrapper or an unregistered note.

Eligibility and the unresolved access question

Spiko markets tokens as ownable by ”any type of investor (including retail investors),” but only after KYC/AML onboarding — the tech blog describes the system as ”public-permissioned,” with only allowlisted addresses able to hold or receive tokens. The published Terms of Use (v2.1, updated 2026-01-13) state Spiko ”reserves the right to refuse access… to residents of countries not eligible,” which implies a jurisdiction gate, but the specific excluded-country list could not be extracted from the PDF in this review. This is the load-bearing open question: an EU UCITS retail fund excluding US persons is the normal case, and until Spiko’s own onboarding flow or terms confirm otherwise, this registry cannot assume its US mass-affluent client base can actually subscribe.

On-chain control

Spiko’s own engineering writeup describes a Permission Manager contract with seven roles: a super-admin multisig with full upgrade and permission control, an exceptional-operator that can pause the token contract, a daily-operator for mint and redeem, an oracle-operator for NAV publication, a burner, an allowlister, and the allowlisted addresses themselves. Contracts use OpenZeppelin’s UUPS upgradeable-proxy pattern, so the super-admin multisig can change contract logic. Non-allowlisted transfers revert. This is a standard permissioned RWA design comparable to Securitize’s DS Protocol, and it is disclosed in enough detail to evaluate — the gap is jurisdictional eligibility, not contract-level opacity.

Redemption and the liquidity-mismatch flag

Subscriptions and redemptions cut off at 10:30am CET and execute at the last published NAV — forward pricing, not instant atomic settlement — with same-day (T+0) settlement per the fund factsheet. On-chain stablecoin legs settle ”at the speed of the blockchain used” following the fund’s next cutoff, not on demand. The European Central Bank’s own macroprudential analysis flags this as a structural mismatch: token holders may expect 24/7 instant liquidity from an on-chain asset, while the underlying fund can only process at fixed daily cutoffs, a run-risk source if perception and fund capacity diverge. Minimums are otherwise low — €1,000/$1,000 for direct subscription, as little as €1 for Web3-app flows once allowlisted.

Track record and comparison

No depeg, hack, or AMF enforcement action against Spiko was found. AUM grew from a €4M pre-seed (June 2024) past a reported $1B milestone to roughly $2.45B TVL at this review, with a $22M Series A led by Index Ventures (July 2025). Against BlackRock BUIDL and Circle USYC, already rejected in this registry on US-person access grounds, Spiko sits under the same open question rather than a confirmed different answer: a genuinely regulated, retail-eligible EU fund is not automatically a US-client-eligible one. Against Ondo Global Markets and Anemoy/JTRSY, both confirmed excluded to US persons, Spiko has the stronger regulatory pedigree (a licensed UCITS retail fund versus a BVI SPV or BVI-licensed professional fund) but the same unresolved question of whether this specific client population can actually subscribe.

Sources

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

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.

ChainVerdictGradeControl constraint
StellarRejected freezable freeze is native at every level: issuers hold revocation and clawback flags on their assets, and since Protocol 26 the validator quorum can vote to freeze specific accounts and trustlines on-chain (CAP-77).
Arbitrum OneApproved · limits hybrid a single sequencer orders >99% of transactions and admin keys can upgrade bridge contracts on a ~7-day timelock.
EthereumApproved sovereign No sequencer, no upgrade key, no operator who can be compelled — rule changes require social consensus.
Polygon PoSRejected hybrid a public validator set orders transactions, but a 5-of-9 multisig can instantly upgrade staking and canonical bridge contracts, while a 5-of-8 controls custom child tokens.
BaseApproved · limits hybrid Coinbase — one regulated US company — operates the only sequencer, and admin keys can upgrade bridge contracts within ~7 days.
StarknetApproved · limits hybrid validity proofs and a regular exit window constrain control, but permissioned proposers and an instant emergency Security Council remain live dependencies.
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