Fund Update : R-co Thematic Blockchain Global Equity — October 2026

“Innovation Exemption: The Path to America’s Continued Leadership” – US Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins, September 17 2026.

In September, softer-than-expected non-farm payroll growth contributed to scale back market expectations of Fed tightening and improve market risk sentiment. On the blockchain and digital assets front, the month was constructive. Despite the CLARITY Act’s legislative setback, both SEC and CFTC pushed forward significant building blocks supporting regulatory clarity for the industry. SEC issued a 5-year Innovation Exemption order, namely granting Tokenized Securities Venues (TSVs) using Automated Market Makers (AMMs) and liquidity providers the right to operate without national exchange and dealer registration. CFTC recognized blockchain-based ledgers as compliant record-keeping systems for tokenized assets. Digital assets investment products benefitted from the third consecutive month of positive inflows, reaching more than US$3.8bn globally⁴. M&A and capital markets activity remained robust during the month. Notable developments included S&P Global agreeing to purchase crypto security firm Open Zeppelin and Intercontinental Exchange investing in tZERO alongside a strategic tokenization partnership applied to collateral management.

Against this backdrop, the fund delivered a broadly flat performance and ended the month slightly positive. Tokenization company Securitize was best contributor this month, on sharp rebound post SEC Innovation Exemption announcement. The blockchain infrastructure bucket was the strongest contributor as a whole, led by AI-compute-exposed companies Hut 8 and CleanSpark, as well as software provider Okta. The audit trail / industrial applications category was the main detractor, primarily due to weakness in Abaxx. We remain constructive on Abaxx, supported by a solid rebound in exchange trading volumes and open interest during the second half of September, and we modestly increased our position during the month. We also added to our position in Base Carbon on weakness. The company continues to make progress toward qualifying its carbon credits for the CORSIA compliance market, with an additional 639k credits deemed eligible this month, bringing its eligible inventory to approximately 1.9 million credits. The underlying project is expected to generate roughly 2.6 million carbon credits every six months over its lifetime⁴. Finally, we remained disciplined and took some profits in Snowflake and Okta following their strong outperformance over the period relative to their sectors. We ended the month with 98.5% equity exposure⁵.

Industry news to watch:

The European Central Bank plans to invest in tokenized securities through Pontes, the new Eurosystem DLT platform.

Latin American telecom operator VIVA is putting part of its financial operating system onchain through Iris.

India's securities regulator SEBI, alongside the RBI, launched "Demat 2.0," a pilot to issue and settle corporate bonds as digital tokens on a permissioned ledger, targeting a US$620bn market.