EquiLend, the securities finance utility giant with $40 trillion in loanable assets, said it made a “strategic” minority investment in regulated crypto financing provider Digital Prime Technologies.
The company said it is meeting client demand for governed, transparent workflows that move from trading to post-trade processing and reporting directly on traditional and digital tools. It declined to disclose the value of the investment.
The partnership will center on Digital Prime’s institutional lending network Tokenet. Tokenet supports multi-custodian and multi-collateral lifecycle management, risk monitoring and institutional reporting, the companies said. Future phases include the introduction of regulated stablecoin collateral and other tokenization tools.
CEO Rich Grossi told CoinDesk that the move was to prepare for real-world asset tokenization and not stray away from EquiLend’s core traditional financial customer base.
“The key is that this investment is to prepare for this market trajectory,” Grossi said. “We have spent years building the infrastructure to support the transparency, governance and scale of traditional securities lending. As tokenized assets and digital instruments mature, we see the same institutional requirements emerge.”
Grossi noted that while traditional finance (TradFi) remains the company’s main focus, it sees clients “looking at expanding asset classes” and therefore needs a bridge that provides “continuity across asset classes.”
EquiLend chief product officer Nick Delikaris said the cryptocurrency lending market has been dealing with the same problems the company started solving in the early 2000s.
“Many of the challenges we see in digital asset financing reflect early issues with traditional securities lending – fragmented workflows, limited collateral liquidity and inconsistent post-trade processes,” Delicaris said.
The timing of the deal follows a regulatory shift in favor of cryptocurrencies in the U.S. during Trump’s second administration, with Grossi arguing that there is “increasing alignment between traditional market infrastructure and digital asset regulation” as regulatory transparency increases.
“We are seeing increased participation in tokenization by regulators, exchanges and market utilities,” Grossi said. “This is a smart time for EquiLend to invest.”