Tradable announced that it has tokenized $1.7 billion in private credit on the Zksync layer 2 blockchain. We were curious about which asset managers originated the credit, but it turns out the seed investors last year were Victory Park Capital (VPC) and Spring Labs.
Tradable is headquartered in the Chicago offices of VPC, which in turn was recently acquired by Janus Henderson. The new CEO of Tradable is also head of technology at VPC. Given VPC is a major asset manager in the private credit sector, a large chunk of the tokenized assets were likely originated Victory Park Capital. We requested further details about the deal originators but didn’t get a response in time for publication. If most of it is from VPC, then it represents a reasonable proportion of VPC’s $10.6 billion total investments to date.
So far there are 27 tokenizations, ranging from personal injury legal receivables to buy now pay later and music royalties. Most of it is in North America, but some tokens relate to Singapore credit and others have Latin American exposure. The profile of qualifying investors depends on the tokenization issuance.
“Tradable seamlessly bridges the on-chain / off-chain divide, while abstracting away all the complexity of adopting web3 technology,” said Alex Cordover, who became CEO of Tradable in October. “By leveraging blockchain rails, we’re enabling the supply side to provide any arbitrary institutional grade asset, starting with best-in-class private credit opportunities, to any number of demand side investors, whether on-chain or not.”
ParaFi Capital investment
The company also announced an investment from ParaFi Capital, which is the backer of another credit tokenization firm, Credix. ParaFi’s managing partner, Ben Forman, has experience working in the credit business at KKR.
Apart from the seed investors, other backers include the developer of Zksync, Matter Labs, and Janus Henderson Investments. It’s unclear whether the Janus investment pre-dated its VPC acquisition, or is part of it. Seed investor Spring Labs was founded as an onchain credit scoring firm with enhanced privacy. The TransUnion backed startup now provides tokenization services and various compliance solutions incorporating AI.
“As a global asset manager, we view blockchain technology as possibly one of the most disruptive future developments in financial services,” said Nick Cherney, Janus Henderson’s Head of Innovation. “The path and pace of that disruption will be set by the efficiency and adoption of tokenization of traditional (real world) assets, and Tradable is bringing together key players across alternative and traditional finance which is the critical path to broad adoption of tokenization.” Janus made its first steps in the tokenization space last September.
Meanwhile, Tradable plans to support secondary market transactions in the future.
Other companies active in tokenizing private credit include Figure, the UK’s Fasanara and German SME credit fintech Teylor.
