Solana Sees Arrival of Nomura, Brevan Howard-Affiliated Tokenization Firm Libre

Libre, a tokenization-focused startup and joint venture between hedge fund Brevan Howard’s WebN Group and financial services giant Nomura’s Laser Digital, is adding a bevy of blockchain-based funds to the Solana network, including the debut of a Hamilton Lane credit fund.

Adding the company’s tokenization gateway to the Solana blockchain will, for the first time, give users access to the on-chain Hamilton Lane SCOPE fund as well as the Brevan Howard Master Fund and Blackrock ICS Money Market Fund, Libre said in a press release.

A growing trend for tokenizing existing financial assets – so-called real-world assets (RWAs) – has seen some large asset managers, including the largest, BlackRock, embrace public blockchains. Libre’s coalition of traditional finance and cryptocurrency institutions first established its blockchain funds offering using Polygon CDK, a layer-2 chain for Ethereum.

The move beyond Ethereum-compatible chains marks the first institutional alternative RWA fund to appear on Solana, Libre CEO Avtar Sehra said. The expansion had garnered close to $20 million in total locked value (TVL) even prior to the public launch.

“Solana’s importance to financial services is quite significant around secondary trading,” Sehra said in an interview. “They have developed the chain for capabilities of increasing throughput, so the number of transactions per second, and also the reduction of the latency between transactions. Since we’re planning to launch secondary trading services later this year, we decided to provide access to all of our funds on Solana now.”

Money market funds have proved useful to institutional traders in the crypto space who want to earn additional yield from their stablecoins holdings, for instance. Some investors will be looking for higher yields of around 9% offered by the Hamilton Lane SCOPE fund, Sehra noted.

“This launch will expand access to the historical strong returns and performance opportunities generated within the private markets, while increasing efficiency and transparency for all investors,” said Victor Jung, head of digital assets at Hamilton Lane, in a statement.