“We saw clear, unmet demand from onchain investors for a product that combines real-economy yield with daily liquidity features,” said Connor Dougherty, CEO of Valinor. “VBDC is designed to meet that demand, combining Valinor’s underwriting and credit expertise with Superstate’s onchain infrastructure.”
Nothing Tokenized Yet
The VBDC token contract at 0xA4E0Ac02de99e23C76480dD75e55894fD74cDECF went live on Ethereum on Sept. 1, an upgradeable proxy pointing at a contract Superstate names FundToken. Its total supply is zero and it has recorded no transfers. Superstate’s asset page lists the fund’s DeFi integrations as “Coming soon.”
Robert Leshner, the Compound founder who runs Superstate, described the fund in the announcement as “the first high-yield private credit fund that’s tokenized, offers daily liquidity, and is usable in DeFi, expanding what investors can hold, use, and build with onchain.”
Apollo tokenized a private credit fund with Securitize in January 2025, and the underlying Apollo Diversified Credit Fund repurchases shares “up to 5% of the Fund’s issued and outstanding shares” on a quarterly cycle, according to its SEC filing. Daily redemption is the leg of Leshner’s claim that separates VBDC from it. The DeFi leg is pending.
Fees Beneath The Fee
Superstate’s own disclosures put the total cost above the headline number. Investors “bear the 1.25% Fund management fee and indirectly bear the underlying BDCs’ base and incentive fees, financing costs, and operating expenses; the aggregate burden is materially higher than 1.25%,” the disclaimers state. Public BDC managers typically charge a base management fee on gross assets plus an incentive fee on income above a hurdle, and the fund’s holdings are subject to what Superstate calls common-adviser concentration.
Idle cash and the fund’s liquidity buffer may be parked in the Invesco Short Duration US Government Securities Fund, which Superstate tokenizes as USTB and which charges its own 0.15% management fee. Invesco’s Global Liquidity team took over portfolio management of that fund from Superstate in the second quarter. The disclaimers describe USTB as unaffiliated and note that assets sitting there bear two layers of management fees.
The fund publishes no yield. It pays no dividends, reinvesting income from its BDC holdings into NAV, and reports a 30-day return instead. That figure currently reads as a dash.
Gated At 7.5%
Redemption requests received by 2 p.m. ET on a day when both the NYSE and the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia are open are processed at that day’s NAV and settle on or about the next such day. The fund meets them from a liquidity buffer and from sales of portfolio holdings, and applies a gate of up to 7.5% of NAV per day, with pro-ration, deferral, limitation or suspension available under the private placement memorandum. Subscriptions cut off at 3:59 p.m. ET.
Proceeds are calculated and payable in dollars. Investors may elect USDC through Circle under Circle’s separate terms. Shares are restricted securities transferable only among allowlisted addresses, are not listed, and have no secondary market.
Alpaca Securities is custodian, NAV Consulting is fund administrator, and Superstate Services, Superstate’s own SEC-registered transfer agent, keeps the share register. The auditor is listed as “To be appointed prior to first annual audit.”
Holdings By Generic Label
Superstate discloses the portfolio “on an aggregated and anonymized basis,” with positions “identified by generic labels rather than by name” that “may not refer to the same holding across periods.” No holdings table appears on the fund’s page. The constituents are exchange-listed companies that file quarterly with the SEC, and the fund does not name which of them it owns or how the basket is weighted, beyond Valinor’s description of the methodology as “smart beta.”
Trading Below The Marks
The gap between BDC share prices and BDC loan marks is the risk the wrapper imports. Blue Owl Capital Corp reported net asset value of $14.26 a share as of June 30 in its second-quarter 10-Q and traded at $11.09 on Thursday afternoon, 22% below that mark. FS KKR Capital Corp reported $18.30 and traded at $11.91, a 35% discount. Blackstone Secured Lending Fund reported $25.53 and traded at $24.30, a 5% discount.
Superstate’s risk factors name the exposure directly: premium and discount-to-NAV volatility, BDC-level leverage, payment-in-kind income, single-issuer and common-adviser concentration, and tracking error from the smart-beta methodology. The fund uses no leverage of its own, though its net position is leveraged once the borrowing at its BDC holdings is aggregated.
Superstate Crosses $1 Billion
VBDC is the fourth tokenized fund on Superstate’s rails and takes the platform’s combined fund assets to just over $1 billion. USTB holds $816 million, the Bitwise Crypto Carry Fund holds $158 million, and the Coinbase USD Stablecoin Yield Fund holds $25 million. Coinbase Asset Management’s fund was the first outside issuance built on FundOS from inception, in April.
Valinor raised a $25 million seed round led by Castle Island Ventures in March, with Apollo, Maven 11 and Neoclassic Capital among the investors. Dougherty worked in Blackstone’s GSO special situations credit group before founding the firm in late 2023. VBDC is Valinor’s first product open to broad subscription.
