What SAFO is
SAFO, the Spiko Amundi Overnight Swap Fund, is a tokenised sub-fund of the SPIKO SICAV, a French-regulated investment company, offered in partnership between fintech Spiko and Amundi, one of Europe's largest asset managers. It's designed as a cash-equivalent instrument for corporate and institutional treasuries, aiming to generate yield above the SOFR benchmark while offering 24/7 on-chain transferability that a conventional money market fund can't match.
How the yield is generated
SAFO's structure differs from typical tokenised Treasury funds: rather than simply holding short-dated government debt, it generates return through fully collateralised total return swaps (TRS) with Tier 1 bank counterparties rated A- or above by the major agencies. BNP Paribas was the first counterparty, providing a basket of US equities as collateral on which the bank earns the underlying return, while SAFO receives the swap-based yield. Spiko names a roster of roughly 14 eligible global systemically important banks, including Société Générale, Crédit Agricole CIB, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Citi, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, UBS and HSBC.
Infrastructure and access
Amundi acts as SAFO's delegated investment manager, CACEIS serves as depositary bank and fund administrator, and Chainlink supplies the on-chain net asset value oracle used to keep the token's reported value current. The shareholder register spans seven networks — Ethereum, Polygon PoS, Arbitrum One, Starknet, Base, Etherlink and Stellar — and SAFO is available in four currencies (EUR, USD, GBP, CHF) with subscriptions starting from as little as 1 unit of the relevant currency, a low entry point relative to most institutional cash products.
Risks
SAFO's total-return-swap structure means its yield and creditworthiness are tied not just to the fund's own assets but to the health of its bank swap counterparties — a form of counterparty risk that conventional Treasury-backed tokenised funds largely avoid by holding government debt directly. The restriction to G-SIB-rated banks mitigates but doesn't eliminate that exposure. As a relatively new structure combining tokenisation, swaps and multichain issuance, SAFO also carries operational and smart-contract risk around its oracle and cross-chain infrastructure, and its yield premium over SOFR is not guaranteed to persist if swap market pricing shifts.