Swiss digital asset bank Sygnum plans to offer DLT-registered shares in a $3.8 billion Hamilton Lane fund to its professional, institutional and corporate clients. Many blockchain-based funds take existing shares and tokenize them. In contrast, this Luxembourg-based Global Private Assets (GPA) Fund will issue a separate class of shares natively on the Polygon blockchain. The global fund administrator and transfer agent Apex Group is also involved in the project.
Hamilton lane manages more than $900 billion in private market assets.
The goal of using DLT is to lower the minimum required investment to make the fund more accessible. It will use Sygnum’s DLT solution for the registration, with FundRock-LRI managing the on-chain share registry. It benefits from the efficiencies enabled by using DLT and automation and also integrates fund administration functions that would traditionally be separate.
This is the latest example of the alternative investment management sector leveraging blockchain to expand its investor base.
“We strongly believe that tokenisation has the potential to transform the way investors gain access to the historically strong returns and performance opportunities within the private markets, and are delighted to announce this digital-native, institutional-grade offering with Sygnum and Apex,” said Victor Jung, Head of Digital Assets at Hamilton Lane.
“This joint initiative with the Swiss Private Wealth team underscores the region as a leading digital asset hub that we believe will serve as a catalyst for broader adoption within the banking and wealth management industry.”
Hamilton Lane’s attraction to DLT
This isn’t Hamilton Lane’s first attempt at DLT native fund shares. It originally planned to do this in the United States in 2022 when it partnered with Figure Technologies. The aim was to issue a digital share class for its Hamilton Lane Private Assets Fund on the Provenance blockchain. The first registration filing was in October 2022. After delaying the launch more than a dozen times in an attempt to satisfy the SEC, Hamilton Lane abandoned it a year later.
Amongst asset managers, Hamilton Lane has been one of the most prolific when it comes to blockchain. Before its attempts with Figure, it launched a tokenized fund in Asia with Singapore’s ADDX in early 2022, which it followed up by tokenizing three existing funds with Securitize.
Last month Hamilton Lane partnered with Libre, a fund protocol founded by Nomura’s Laser Digital. Unsurprisingly, the United States is not Libre’s first planned jurisdiction. It will start in Singapore and expand to Abu Dhabi and Luxembourg.
