Janus Henderson, SmartMedia Technologies (SMT) and Centrifuge announced a new institutional onchain vault designed to manage the reserve assets behind loyalty programs.

The strategy brings together Janus Henderson’s investment management capabilities, SMT’s enterprise loyalty and programmable value infrastructure, and Centrifuge’s tokenization and institutional vault technology.

Loyalty programs issue more than $300 billion in value annually, but the assets supporting those programs are typically managed separately from the systems where points are issued and redeemed. SMT powers programs and activations for organizations including Visa, FIFA, Huntington Bank, Olympics, Samsung, Inter Miami CF and X Games. Centrifuge vaults extend that infrastructure to the reserve assets behind them. Customers continue to earn and redeem rewards through familiar digital experiences.

Janus Henderson will actively manage designated reserve assets supporting SMT’s loyalty programs through the vault, initially allocating across its tokenized JTRSY and JAAA strategies, which already hold a combined $1.5 billion in AUM, as of August 2026. The investment universe can expand over time to additional Janus Henderson funds and other eligible onchain assets.

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“Vaults are the natural extension of our tokenization strategy because they let us move from putting individual funds onchain to actively managing portfolios built for specific client needs. Loyalty is a particularly compelling use case. The assets, liabilities and redemptions are increasingly digital, so the portfolio supporting them should be able to operate programmatically as well.” – Nick Cherney, Head of Innovation, Janus Henderson

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Centrifuge connects the tokenized fund and vault layers in a single platform, allowing asset managers to issue individual funds and construct portfolios across onchain assets within the same system.

“Centrifuge provides the infrastructure for asset managers to operate onchain — from tokenizing individual funds to building and managing strategies across them. Vaults extend that infrastructure from individual products into portfolios built around specific client needs.” – Bhaji Illuminati, Chief Executive Officer, Centrifuge

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For SMT, the vault adds an asset-management layer beneath an enterprise platform already used to power loyalty, rewards and consumer engagement across payments, sports and global brands.

“The loyalty industry has historically separated the consumer experience from the financial infrastructure supporting the value being issued. SMT has created the programmable infrastructure that connects wallets, points, rewards and redemption into one enterprise platform. By extending that infrastructure to the reserve layer with Janus Henderson and Centrifuge, we can create a more transparent, efficient and programmable model for loyalty, while keeping the experience completely familiar and intuitive for consumers.” – Tyler Moebius, Founder and CEO, SmartMedia Technologies

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Loyalty offers a blueprint for how tokenization can reach mass adoption: not by asking consumers to change how they interact with financial products, but by making the infrastructure behind those products better. The biggest applications of blockchain may ultimately be the ones consumers never need to know are onchain.