Yesterday Laser Digital, Nomura’s Swiss digital asset business, announced it is acquiring Elysium Technology Group. Elysium is an established provider of post trade solutions for over-the-counter FX markets and, more recently, digital assets.
The aim is to apply Elysium’s expertise to the digital assets sector, but it will continue to grow its FX product lines.
Elysium CEO Ed Mount spent his early career at UBS and a year running Nomura’s Global eFX Trading in 2015 before rejoining Elysium.
Laser Digital highlighted Elysium’s RiskDB workflow solution and MatchHub, which enables trade matching, netting and settlement.
“The acquisition of Elysium is a strategic move that aligns perfectly with our vision for the future of finance,” said Steve Ashley, Executive Chairman of Laser Digital. “Combining Laser Digital with Elysium’s RiskDB and MatchHub platforms will enable us to deliver the cross-asset post-trade system institutional digital asset investors require.”
Elysium is not the first FX platform to get involved with digital assets. Standard Chartered backed CobaltFX used blockchain-inspired concepts for its FX middle office solution and also expanded into digital assets.
At a big picture level, the convergence of FX and digital assets is on the cards, even if it takes time. Multiple trials have used DeFi automated market makers to trade tokenized currencies, including central bank digital currency (CBDC) and deposit tokens.
Laser invests in end-to-end trading infrastrucure
Meanwhile, Laser Digital has five other investments in its portfolio. So far this includes custody, trading, post trade and central counterparty.
Prior to Laser’s formation, Nomura invested in Komainu, a digital asset custody joint venture with Coinshares and Ledger. Nomura also backed AllInfra an climate and tokenization startup.
More recently, Laser has invested in DeFi market making technology platform Orderly which adopts a more conventional order book approach to market making versus simplistic DeFi algorithms that often result in wide spreads. It also backed ClearToken, which is creating a central counterparty to reduce risk and Crossover Markes, an execution only crypto network for institutions.
