Laser Digital and Keyring bring institutional fixed income markets to Euler

Nomura’s digital asset unit Laser Digital has partnered with Keyring Network to build institutional fixed income markets on decentralized finance infrastructure, with the first lending and borrowing products prepared for Euler Finance.

According to a Sept. 2 announcement from Laser Digital and Keyring, the partnership will combine institutional risk controls with permissioned DeFi infrastructure for qualifying participants. Keyring will provide the technology for individual lending markets, while Laser Digital’s asset management division will contribute governance standards, portfolio structuring and market practice.

The companies have not disclosed how much capital will be committed to the markets, the fees attached to them or a launch date. Borrowers and lenders participating in the first products have not been named either.

Laser Digital will set institutional risk standards

Laser Digital’s role will center on the risk framework governing the planned markets. Keyring will handle access verification, quantitative risk parameters and the design of liquidation systems, while responsibilities between the firms will be determined separately for each contract based on the asset, strategy and risk profile.

The structure extends Laser Digital’s work with institutional onchain products. In August, the Nomura subsidiary partnered with ZIGChain on a pipeline of products tied to emerging market private credit, PayFi, invoice financing, small business funding and stablecoin services.

Under that arrangement, Laser Digital agreed to support product structuring, governance and risk framework design for ZIG Markets vaults. ZIGChain said it was targeting at least $100 million in total value locked across the planned products, although the size of Laser Digital’s investment and a timetable for reaching the target were not disclosed.

The Keyring partnership focuses first on fixed income lending and borrowing. Laser Digital and Keyring identified permissioning, exploit risk, governance and settlement as four constraints that have limited institutional participation in open DeFi lending markets.

Unrestricted access can create compliance issues for institutions, while smart contract and protocol exploits introduce risks that can be difficult to quantify, the companies said. They identified limited institutional oversight and differences between traditional clearing processes and DeFi’s instant settlement model as further obstacles.

Their framework combines zero knowledge permissioning, quantitative risk modeling, institutional governance standards, cyber insurance and other risk controls. Keyring’s [un]wind technology will provide the settlement component.

“Institutional interest in on-chain fixed income stems from real opportunity, but constraints remain,” Laser Digital co-founder and CEO Jez Mohideen said.

Mohideen said the companies are working on assets that behave more like conventional fixed income instruments than speculative crypto tokens while retaining onchain settlement.

Euler Finance will host the first markets

The first lending markets are ready to go live on Euler Finance, according to the companies, although no deployment date was provided. Other partners, products and strategies are expected to follow in phases.

Euler already supports lending markets built around institutional and tokenized assets. In May, VanEck’s VBILL went live on Euler, allowing investors to use the asset manager’s tokenized U.S. Treasury fund as collateral for onchain borrowing.

The integration followed Euler’s addition of Securitize’s DS Protocol, which allows tokenized securities to interact with lending markets while maintaining investor eligibility and transfer restrictions. RedStone supplies pricing data for VBILL on Euler.

A similar institutional asset reached the protocol in May 2025 when sBUIDL, a token backed 1:1 by BlackRock’s BUIDL fund and issued by Securitize, entered Euler lending markets. The Avalanche deployment was curated by Re7 Labs and allowed sBUIDL holders to use the asset as collateral for USDC and AUSD borrowing.

Euler’s modular structure allows market creators to configure collateral requirements, liquidation parameters and access permissions for individual lending markets. Institutional managers including K3 Capital, MEV Capital and Re7 Capital have previously managed vaults on the protocol.

DefiLlama data currently puts Euler V2’s total value locked at approximately $377.5 million. Monad accounts for nearly $248.9 million, followed by Ethereum at $92.7 million and Base at $21.4 million. The protocol generated roughly $1.63 million in fees over the past 30 days and close to $51,840 in protocol revenue over the same period.

Euler’s current structure followed its recovery from a major security incident in March 2023, when an exploit drained approximately $197 million from the protocol. Most of the stolen assets were subsequently returned, and Euler later rebuilt its lending architecture around its V2 system.

Nomura has expanded Laser Digital’s institutional operations

Laser Digital was established by Nomura in 2022 as the Japanese financial group built a dedicated digital asset business spanning trading, asset management, investment and blockchain-based financial products.

Its institutional operations have expanded across several markets since then. Crypto.news previously reported that Laser Digital 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 Japanese subsidiary plans to begin by supplying liquidity to domestic virtual asset service providers before considering digital asset trading services for institutional investors. Laser Digital has not provided a launch date for the institutional trading business.

Nomura and Laser Digital found in a 2026 survey that 79% of respondents planned to invest in crypto assets within three years. Outside Japan, Laser Digital already operates asset management products and holds a full crypto business license in Dubai.

Keyring brings a different part of the infrastructure to the new fixed income project. The network operates a permissioned access layer designed to verify users before they interact with DeFi applications while using zero knowledge technology to limit the amount of identifying information exposed onchain.

Alex McFarlane, founder and CEO of Keyring Network, described rates and credit as interconnected parts of the fixed income market and said 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.

The companies said individual responsibilities under the partnership will be established contract by contract, while the first Euler markets will be followed by other products, partners and strategies in phased deployments.