Laser Digital, the digital asset subsidiary of Japan’s Nomura Group, has formed a partnership with Keyring Network to bring fixed income products, the largest asset class in global finance, onchain.

Fixed income is the largest asset class in global finance with outstanding securities of $160 trillion at the end of 2025, according to a report from Laser Digital. In comparison, active real-world assets onchain were just $25.2bn at the end of March this year, as the report said the onchain market remains “tiny” relative to the opportunity.

Dr. Jez Mohideen, chief executive and co-founder of Laser Digital, said in the report that institutional interest in onchain fixed income is no longer theoretical and the opportunity is real, but so are the constraints. Mofhideen said: “We are focussed on building offerings to support assets whose behaviour more closely resembles conventional fixed income instruments than volatile crypto tokens, while preserving the efficiency benefits of on-chain settlement.”

Laser Digital aims to become an advisory risk governor for low-risk DeFi vaults through strategic partnerships, according to the report, by combining quantitative risk modelling and institutional governance. The firm is a regulated, full-spectrum digital asset firm offering institutional-grade over-the-counter trading, asset management, structured financing solutions and early-stage venture capital that Nomura established in 2022.

S&P Global Ratings defines digital asset lending vaults as investment vehicles operating on a blockchain that pool investor deposits and deploy them according to defined strategies, working much like managed fixed income funds. These strategies can be fully automated via smart contracts or managed discretionarily by human managers and depositors receive tokens that represent their proportional claim on the vault’s assets and any accrued returns.

In September this year Laser Digital also announced a partnership with Keyring Network to create institutional fixed income products, catering to the growing institutional demand for fixed income products in DeFi, initially focusing on lending and borrowing markets that meet established standards of governance, compliance, and risk control. Keyring Network is a UK fintech that provides institutional-grade compliance, verification, and trust infrastructure for on-chain and DeFi markets

Keyring will provide infrastructure and tooling to support specific lending and borrowing markets, including access verification, quantitative risk parameterisation, and liquidation framework design. Laser Digital’s asset management division will contribute institutional governance standards, portfolio structuring perspectives, and market practice expertise. They will combine scalable zero-knowledge permissioning, quantitative risk modelling, institutional governance standards, cyber insurance and risk-control mechanisms, as well as settlement technology through Keyring’s [un]wind to enable onchain products to scale beyond the current DeFi liquidity base.

Alex McFarlane, founder and chief executive  of Keyring Network, said in a statement: “By combining Laser Digital’s institutional experience with our DeFi native tooling, we aim to enable fixed income strategies that can function at institutional scale onchain and open the gateway to global markets.”

Andrea Vianelli, chief operating officer, asset management and structuring advisory at Laser Digital, told Markets Media that the firm has been trying to identify the right partner for a long time to bring a set of strategies onchain. Vianelli said: “Keyring pioneered KYC (know your customer) technology, but the founder also has a track record and has previously worked in traditional finance.”

McFarlane has previously worked at Nomura and Commerzbank.

Vianelli said Laser Digital will predominantly be focussed on bringing strategies which are typical in traditional finance onchain. He added: “We believe in the vision of bridging traditional finance and digital asset finance and Laser Digital can play a key role in this.”

There have not been many onchain bond funds and Vianelli expects this to change. He argued that Laser Digital can provide a door to traditional investors who are interest in entering the onchain space, and will also be attractive to onchain natives who believe in the importance of having a fund manager with strong due diligence procedures.

“We are in a peculiar spot because, to my knowledge, we are the first global bank-sponsored type of player getting into the digital asset space beyond tokenization, and we have been in this space for a while,” Vianelli added. “We know what it means to invest onchain and it is In our DNA.”

For example, in May this year KAIO, the institutional tokenization platform incubated by Laser Digital, launched its governance token alongside establishing the KAIO Foundation to oversee protocol governance, treasury management and ecosystem development. At that time the platform supported five institutional-grade funds across more than ten blockchains, with approximately $100m in total value locked, and works with asset managers including BlackRock, Brevan Howard, Hamilton Lane and Laser Digital.

In a year from now, Laser Digital aims to have a full suite of onchain strategies, starting with fixed income, but that is not the end goal. Vianelli added: “The tokenized stock space is quite interesting and there are a few other interesting areas.”