Nomura's Laser Digital Backs ZIGChain in UAE Private Credit Push
Laser Digital, Nomura's crypto arm, is supporting ZIGChain as part of a broader move to bring private credit markets onchain in the UAE.
Nomura's digital asset subsidiary Laser Digital has thrown its weight behind ZIGChain, a blockchain platform positioning itself at the center of a growing effort to move private credit markets onto public ledgers in the United Arab Emirates. The backing signals that one of Japan's most established financial institutions sees real institutional opportunity in the tokenization of alternative lending — a market that has ballooned globally but remained stubbornly opaque and illiquid.
Private credit, which encompasses loans made by non-bank lenders to businesses, has emerged as one of the fastest-growing corners of global finance over the past decade. Bringing these instruments onchain theoretically addresses two longstanding pain points: the difficulty of secondary trading and the lack of real-time transparency into underlying loan performance. ZIGChain's infrastructure appears aimed squarely at solving both, with the UAE serving as a regulatory sandbox that has shown unusual appetite for digital asset experimentation.
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The UAE's broader posture toward blockchain finance makes it a logical staging ground for this kind of initiative. Regulators in Abu Dhabi and Dubai have moved faster than most Western counterparts to create licensing frameworks that accommodate tokenized real-world assets, giving platforms like ZIGChain room to operate and attract institutional partners who might face greater friction elsewhere.
For Laser Digital, the ZIGChain partnership extends a pattern of strategic bets on infrastructure-layer blockchain projects rather than speculative tokens. Nomura's decision to enter the digital asset space through a dedicated subsidiary rather than a tentative internal pilot has always implied a longer time horizon — and backing onchain private credit in an emerging market hub fits that patient-capital posture well. Whether the model scales beyond the UAE will depend heavily on regulatory harmonization and whether institutional allocators become comfortable with blockchain-native credit instruments.
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