Coinbase Asset Management and Apollo have partnered to create tokenized credit products while several fund managers have enabled onchain access to their credit funds this month.

On 27 October 2025 Coinbase Asset Management, a wholly owned subsidiary of Coinbase Global, said in a statement it had formed a partnership with alternatives manager Apollo to bring Coinbase stablecoin credit strategies to market. Apollo, who can underwrite and originate private credit, will collaborate on credit investments with the goal of bringing innovative products to market in 2026. Strategies will include over-collateralized asset lending, corporate direct lending and tokenized credit holdings.

Christine Moy, partner and head of digital assets, data and AI strategy at Apollo, said in a statement: “Partnering with Coinbase Asset Management accelerates our vision of tokenizing credit markets and demonstrates how Apollo’s credit expertise and tokenization strategy can power new forms of yield generation and access within the expanding stablecoin ecosystem.”

Stablecoins reached $300bn in market capitalization in October 2025, with projections to hit $3 trillion by 2030 due to GENIUS Act tailwinds, according to Coinbase. The U.S administration passed the GENIUS Act in July this year to provide the first federal framework for stablecoins. Coinbase and Apollo’s new strategies will aim to prioritize GENIUS-compliant opportunities.

Anthony Bassili, president of Coinbase Asset Management, said in a statement: “The global stablecoin ecosystem, which operates 24/7 on blockchain rails, creates opportunities not available in traditional private credit portfolios. We look forward to working with firms around the world to unlock this new market.”

Coinbase teaming up with Apollo Global to develop stable ‑coin‑backed credit products isn’t just another partnership – it points to the future of lending. Stablecoins like $USDC offer instant settlement and transparent collateral, while Apollo brings decades of credit expertise.…

— The Lumen Report (@TheLumenReport) October 28, 2025

Tokenized credit funds

In October this year other fund managers, including Laser Digital and Hamilton Lane, tokenized funds on KAIO, a purpose-built protocol to tokenize real world assets. More than $200m in fund assets have been tokenized on the protocol and are available to institutional and accredited investors, according to Olivier Dang, chief operating officer at KAIO.

Dang told Markets Media: “The lack of regulatory clarity had made it really difficult for names like Hamilton Lane, Laser Digital, Apollo and BlackRock to really lean in. Now they have more clarity, the process of working with these organizations has become much easier.”

He worked at Nomura for close to a decade in Hong Kong, and then helped the Japanese bank launch Laser Digital, its digital asset arm for trading, asset management, solutions, and early-stage investing in 2022, where he is head of ventures. Laser Digital was looking to invest in tokenizing real world assets as part of its venture arm, but could not find any interesting platforms, according to Dang.

“We decided to incubate KAIO as a joint venture to take an institutional-grade approach to bringing funds onchain,” he added. “What I mean by institutional is thinking through the value chain from compliance, issuance and the whole life cycle to bring regulated funds onto a chain that was purpose built for financial transactions.”

KAIO integrated with the Sei blockchain in October 2025. Justin Barlow, executive director at the Sei Development Foundation, described Sei as a blockchain that was purpose-built for fast, cheap financial transactions. He told Markets Media: “It combines the best pieces of Solana, i.e performance, with the best pieces of Ethereum, which is network effects.”

On 22 October 2025 the Laser Carry Fund went live on Sei via KAIO. The fund generates returns by capturing funding rate inefficiencies and staking yield opportunities in the digital asset space while maintaining market neutrality.  A week earlier Hamilton Lane, an alternatives manager, said in a statement that it had expanded its tokenized fund offerings by bringing onchain access to its evergreen senior credit opportunities fund, SCOPE, on the Sei blockchain via KAIO.

Victor Jung, head of digital assets at Hamilton Lane, said in a statement: “KAIO and Sei Network understand the digitally native end investors that are increasingly looking to diversify their portfolio into private assets, and we are delighted to partner to bring access to our senior private credit platform onchain.”

KAIO said in a statement on 8 October 2025 that it had integrated with Sei to enable secure, compliant, and composable access to alternative investment products directly onchain.

As a result a KAIO token, which holds shares in BlackRock’s money market fund ICS US Dollar Liquidity Fund, was made available onchain. The firm said the token meets the growing demand for secure, low-volatility digital investment products while enabling programmability and composability in treasury operations. The launch also included access to the Brevan Howard Master Fund. KAIO said tokenized funds can be integrated into stablecoin architectures and other decentralized finance (DeFi) applications as collateral or as a yield-bearing reserve, boosting institutional blockchain finance.

Growth

Dang argued that differentiators for KAIO are that it has taken a decentralized approach to tokenization, as well as its backing from Nomura. KAIO is built on Ethereum with gateways to go multi-chain, which allows funds to live on any type of chain. The fund can then be used in any DeFi protocol as a smart contract embeds the compliance logic. KAIO is live on about 10 chains, according to DANG, to meet the needs of fund distributors and clients.

“We are getting a lot of inbound calls from asset managers asking us to tokenize their funds, because the GENIUS Act means digital dollars will be coming onchain,” added Dang. “Stablecoin investors want regulated, high-quality products to invest in.”

He said KAIO will capture increasing market share but the “first billion” is the hardest. KAIO has approximately $500m in its pipeline to bring onchain in the coming months, so he is confident of reaching the $1bn target.

Only 15% of asset managers currently offer tokenized funds, but 41% plan to introduce them soon, according to a whitepaper from fintech Broadridge, Next-gen markets: The rise and reality of tokenization. The whitepaper is based on the 2025 Broadridge Tokenization Survey, which polled 300 financial institutions across North America and Europe. Only 10% of wealth managers are currently actively involved, but a third, 33%, anticipate entering the tokenized market in the near term.

Securitize

Tokenization platform Securitize said in a statement on 28 October 2025 that it will become the first public securities-focused tokenization infrastructure company through a combination with Cantor Equity Partners II, a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by an affiliate of Cantor Fitzgerald.

The transaction values Securitize, which was founded in 2017, at a $1.25bn pre-money equity value, with existing Securitize equity holders rolling 100% of their interests into the combined company, including ARK Invest, BlackRock, and Morgan Stanley Investment Management.

Securitize has tokenized more than $4bn in assets through partnerships with asset managers, including Apollo, BlackRock, Hamilton Lane, KKR, and VanEck, according to the firm. The statement said the launch of KKR’s Health Care Strategic Growth Fund II in 2022 on Securitize marked the first time a major global investment manager tokenized a fund onchain, while BlackRock’s BUIDL, tokenized by Securitize in 2024, has become the largest tokenized real-world asset in the world.

The statement said Securtitze will be uniquely positioned to participate in a $19 trillion total addressable market for tokenization of real-world assets. Securitize also plans to tokenize its own equity, an industry first designed to demonstrate how the public company process and trading can move onchain.

Carlos Domingo, co-founder and chief executive of Securitize, said in a statement: “This is the next chapter in making financial markets operate at the speed of the internet and is another step in our mission to bring the next generation of finance onchain and tokenize the world.”

Tokenization is the single greatest opportunity in all of finance. pic.twitter.com/5tiCqZXnht

— Securitize (@Securitize) October 27, 2025