EquiLend Invests in Digital Prime to Bridge $40 Trillion Traditional Assets with Tokenized Markets
EquiLend has made a strategic minority investment in Digital Prime Technologies, a regulated crypto financing provider, aiming to expand into tokenized assets and digital markets. This partnership focuses on Digital Prime's institutional lending network, Tokenet, which supports multi-custodian and multi-collateral lifecycle management, exposure monitoring, and institutional reporting.
The collaboration is part of a broader goal to provide continuity across asset classes and meet institutional demand for governance and transparency throughout digital markets. Future phases of the partnership will include features such as regulated stablecoin collateral and additional tokenized instruments.
EquiLend, managing approximately $40 trillion in lendable assets, views this move not as a pivot away from traditional finance but as readiness for the market trajectory toward tokenization. CEO Rich Grossi emphasizes that the investment leverages infrastructure built for transparency, governance, and scale in traditional securities lending to prepare for tokenized markets.
CPO Nick Delikaris explains that digital asset financing currently faces early-stage issues similar to those historically experienced by traditional securities lending, including fragmented workflows and challenges in collateral mobility.
The timing of EquiLend's investment aligns with a perceived pro-crypto regulatory shift in the U.S., marked by increased regulatory clarity, better alignment between traditional market infrastructure and digital asset regulation, and heightened engagement from regulators and market utilities on tokenization.
