Laser Digital, the digital assets arm of Japan’s Nomura Group, has taken a stake in ZIGChain’s ZIG token and agreed to structure and oversee risk on a pipeline of onchain private credit products built by ZIG Markets, the Layer 1’s product and access layer.
The arrangement puts a Nomura subsidiary in an underwriting seat for emerging-market private credit, a category that accounts for $7.12 billion of the $37.64 billion in tokenized real-world assets tracked by RWA.xyz.
Both firms describe institutional origination from emerging markets as thin relative to demand, with ZIG Markets supplying regional deal flow across the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan and Laser Digital supplying product structuring, risk framework design and governance.
ZIG Markets has originated more than $50 million to date with no defaults over the past ten months, according to Abdul Rafay Gadit, co-founder and chief commercial officer of ZIGChain. Gadit told The Defiant:
ZIGChain is targeting a minimum of $100 million in total value locked across the vault products, broken into $25 million by September and $100 million by the end of November. Gadit said there is no hard deadline on either.
