Nomura’s Laser Digital Invests in ClearToken Clearing House

Nomura’s digital assets subsidiary, Laser Digital, announced a strategic investment in ClearToken, a startup that will introduce a clearing house to the digital asset marketplace, enabling the scale and structure required for mass institutional engagement with digital assets. As part of Laser’s strategic investment, its CEO, Dr. Jez Mohideen, joins the board of ClearToken as a non- executive director. Laser Digital was launched by Nomura to spearhead its digital asset ambitions and is chaired by Steven Ashley, who previously led Nomura’s wholesale division. Headquartered in Switzerland, Laser Digital’s investments are focused on DeFi, centralized finance (CeFi), web3, and blockchain infrastructure to solve the challenges institutions currently face in digital asset investment. ClearToken has identified a missing piece in the digital asset market structure. As traditional asset management, insurance and banking institutions face the challenges of engaging with digital assets, ClearToken will introduce traditional market structure best practices. ClearToken is building a Central Counterparty (CCP) to address the key issues and challenges that arise in the market structure for digital asset trading. The CCP will remove bilateral counterparty risk for settlement, financing and derivative transactions by centralising clearing, settlement, collateral and risk management arrangements, akin to traditional exchange traded assets. This will enable all participants in the ecosystem, investors, exchanges, brokers, market makers and custodians to face the CCP rather than each other, thereby streamlining transactions, increasing capital efficiency and reducing risk for all participants. ClearToken’s CCP is not native to any individual exchange or platform and can act to clear bilaterally-agreed transactions over-the-counter.