Laser Digital and Keyring Bring Institutional Fixed Income Markets to Euler Finance

Nomura’s crypto arm brings institutional fixed income to DeFi

Laser Digital, the digital asset subsidiary of Japanese banking group Nomura, has partnered with Keyring Network to build institutional fixed income markets on decentralized finance infrastructure, with the first lending and borrowing products prepared for deployment on Euler Finance. The partnership, announced on Sept. 2, pairs Nomura’s institutional risk discipline with a permissioned DeFi access layer, in one of the more concrete attempts yet to bridge traditional fixed income with onchain money markets.

Under the arrangement, Keyring will provide the core technology for individual lending markets, handling access verification, quantitative risk parameters and the design of liquidation systems. Laser Digital’s asset management division will contribute governance standards, portfolio structuring and market practice. The two firms said responsibilities will be determined separately for each contract, depending on the underlying asset, strategy and risk profile.

No launch date, committed capital, fee structure or named participants have been disclosed so far. The companies said additional partners, products and strategies are expected to follow the initial Euler deployment in phases.

Four constraints that keep institutions out of DeFi lending

In laying out the rationale for the partnership, Laser Digital and Keyring identified four constraints that have historically limited institutional participation in open DeFi lending markets: permissioning, exploit risk, governance and settlement.

Unrestricted, pseudonymous access can create compliance problems for regulated institutions that are required to know who is on the other side of a trade. Smart contract and protocol exploits introduce risks that are difficult to quantify through a traditional risk framework, a concern underscored by a long history of nine-figure DeFi hacks. Limited institutional oversight of market practices and the mismatch between traditional clearing processes and DeFi’s instant settlement model round out the list.

The proposed framework combines zero-knowledge permissioning, quantitative risk modeling, institutional governance standards, cyber insurance and other risk controls. Keyring’s so-called [un]wind technology will provide the settlement component. Keyring operates a permissioned access layer designed to verify users before they interact with DeFi applications, while using zero-knowledge technology to limit how much identifying information is exposed onchain.

“Institutional interest in on-chain fixed income stems from real opportunity, but constraints remain,” said Jez Mohideen, co-founder and chief executive of Laser Digital. Mohideen said the companies are working on assets that behave more like conventional fixed income instruments than speculative crypto tokens, while retaining onchain settlement.

Alex McFarlane, founder and CEO of Keyring Network, framed rates and credit as interconnected parts of the fixed income market and argued that tokenized assets had expanded rapidly without reaching much of the available market. “Despite multi-year exponential growth in tokenised assets, we haven’t yet scratched the surface,” McFarlane said.

Euler as the first venue

The first lending markets are ready to go live on Euler Finance, according to the companies, although no deployment date was provided. The choice of venue is notable: Euler already supports lending markets built around institutional and tokenized assets, and its modular architecture lets market creators configure collateral requirements, liquidation parameters and access permissions for each individual market.

In May, VanEck’s tokenized U.S. Treasury fund VBILL went live on Euler, allowing investors to use the fund as collateral for onchain borrowing. The integration followed Euler’s addition of Securitize’s DS Protocol, which lets tokenized securities interact with lending markets while preserving investor eligibility rules and transfer restrictions, with RedStone supplying pricing data. A similar institutional asset arrived earlier, when sBUIDL, a token backed one-to-one by BlackRock’s BUIDL fund and issued by Securitize, entered Euler lending markets on Avalanche in May 2025, curated by Re7 Labs.

Institutional managers including K3 Capital, MEV Capital and Re7 Capital have previously managed vaults on the protocol. According to DefiLlama data, Euler V2 currently holds a total value locked of roughly 377.5 million USD, with nearly 248.9 million USD on Monad, about 92.7 million USD on Ethereum and 21.4 million USD on Base. The protocol generated roughly 1.63 million USD in fees over the past 30 days and close to 51,840 USD in protocol revenue over the same period.

Euler’s current structure followed a painful lesson: in March 2023, an exploit drained approximately 197 million USD from the protocol. Most of the stolen assets were subsequently returned after negotiations with the attacker, and Euler later rebuilt its lending architecture around the V2 system.

A broader Nomura push into tokenized finance

The partnership extends a busy stretch for Laser Digital, which Nomura established in 2022 as the group’s dedicated digital asset business spanning trading, asset management, investment and blockchain-based financial products. In August, the firm partnered with ZIGChain on a pipeline of products tied to emerging market private credit, PayFi, invoice financing, small business funding and stablecoin services, supporting product structuring and risk framework design for ZIG Markets vaults, with ZIGChain targeting at least 100 million USD in total value locked across the planned products.

Laser Digital also secured registration in Japan in August as a crypto asset exchange service provider, becoming the country’s first newly registered entrant in roughly four years. The subsidiary plans to begin by supplying liquidity to domestic virtual asset service providers before considering institutional trading services, though it has not provided a launch date. Outside Japan, Laser Digital already operates asset management products and holds a full crypto business license in Dubai. Nomura and Laser Digital’s 2026 survey found that 79 percent of respondents planned to invest in crypto assets within three years.

For DeFi lending, the deal is a signal that the next wave of institutional adoption may arrive not through open, permissionless pools but through permissioned markets that borrow the compliance toolkit of traditional credit. Whether that compromise captures meaningful scale on Euler, and how quickly the unnamed first participants arrive, will be the measure of the thesis.

Market context at time of writing (price cache, Sept. 3, 17:00 UTC): Bitcoin trading near 80,925 USD, up 4.87 percent over 24 hours; Ethereum near 2,493.53 USD, up 4.56 percent; Solana near 104.66 USD, up 5.92 percent.