EquiLend, a securities finance giant with $40 trillion in lendable assets, said it made a “strategic” minority investment in Digital Prime Technologies, a regulated crypto finance provider.
The company said it is responding to client demand for managed, transparent workflows that can flow directly from trading to post-trade processing and reporting across both traditional and digital instruments. It declined to say how much the investment was worth.
The partnership will focus on Tokenet, Digital Prime’s institutional lending network. The token supports multi-custodial and multi-collateral lifecycle management, exposure monitoring and institutional reporting, the companies said. Future phases include the introduction of regulated stablecoin collateral and additional tokenized instruments.
The move is about readiness for real-world active tokenization and not a pivot away from EquiLend’s traditional traditional financial customer base, CEO Rich Grossi told CoinDesk
“The key point is that this investment is about readiness for this market trajectory,” Grossi said. “We have spent years building infrastructure that supports transparency, governance and scale across 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 primary focus, it is seeing clients “consider expanding asset classes,” necessitating a bridge that offers “continuity across asset classes.”
The cryptocurrency lending market has been dealing with the same problems the company began solving in the early 2000s, said EquiLends Chief Product Officer Nick Delikaris.
“Many of the challenges we see in digital asset finance reflect early-stage problems in traditional securities lending — fragmented workflows, limited mobility of collateral and inconsistent post-trade processes,” Delikaris said.
The timing of the deal follows the U.S.’s pro-crypto regulatory shift under the second Trump administration, with Grossi seeing a “growing alignment between traditional market infrastructure and regulation of digital assets” as regulatory clarity grows.
“We are seeing increased engagement from regulators, exchanges and market tools around tokenization,” Grossi said. “For EquiLend, that made this a smart moment to invest.”
