Nomura's Laser Digital Brings Fixed Income Markets to DeFi via Keyring Partnership

Nomura's Laser Digital is expanding its presence in decentralized finance (DeFi) by launching fixed income markets. The company will act as a risk governor for lending markets built with Keyring Network, with the first markets ready for Euler Finance.

The partnership aims to address four major barriers that have kept institutions out of DeFi lending: permissioning, exploit risk, governance, and settlement. To overcome these challenges, Laser Digital and Keyring will use a combination of zero-knowledge permissioning, quantitative risk modeling, cyber insurance, and Keyring's settlement technology.

According to Jez Mohideen, co-founder and CEO of Laser Digital, 'institutional interest in on-chain fixed income stems from real opportunity, but constraints remain.' He adds that their partnership with Keyring focuses on building solutions for assets whose behavior resembles conventional fixed-income instruments rather than speculative crypto tokens.

Euler Finance has been named as the first partner to launch markets using this new framework. The protocol currently holds $368.8 million in total value locked across 17 chains and $555.4 million in outstanding borrows, according to DefiLlama.