Laser Digital, the crypto subsidiary of Japanese banking giant Nomura, has made a strategic investment in ZIGChain’s $ZIG token and signed on to structure and oversee risk for a pipeline of onchain private credit products. The deal puts one of Asia’s most established financial institutions squarely behind a Layer 1 blockchain’s push into tokenized lending.

The investment, estimated in the high single-digit millions of dollars, is designed to help ZIGChain’s product layer, ZIG Markets, build out institutional-grade private credit offerings. The target: a minimum of $100 million in total value locked.

What Nomura’s backing actually means

Laser Digital isn’t just writing a check. The Nomura subsidiary is taking on a structuring and risk oversight role for ZIGChain’s private credit pipeline, including private credit, SME financing, invoice factoring, and stablecoin infrastructure.

Laser Digital has been operational since 2022 and holds regulatory approvals in both Dubai and Abu Dhabi. In May 2026, it received conditional approval for a US national trust bank license. The firm also maintains established relationships with Standard Chartered and the Apex Group, giving ZIGChain a potential pathway into their distribution channels.

ZIGChain’s evolution from social trading to RWAs

ZIGChain traces its lineage to Zignaly, a social investment platform launched in 2018. Over the years, the project pivoted from copy-trading tools to building a dedicated Layer 1 blockchain focused on real-world asset tokenization and institutional-grade financial products.

The $ZIG token currently trades near $0.04, with a circulating supply of approximately 1.41 billion tokens and a market cap hovering between $56 million and $59 million. ZIGChain describes itself as a URI-based Layer 1, positioning its architecture around institutional use cases.

The bigger picture: private credit goes onchain

The total market for tokenized RWAs now exceeds $30 billion, and private credit has emerged as the primary category driving institutional adoption. Laser Digital holds regulatory approvals in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, jurisdictions that have established actual regulatory frameworks for onchain finance.

For ZIGChain, reaching $100 million in TVL would represent a roughly 2x jump relative to the project’s current market cap.

What this means for investors

For $ZIG holders, the high single-digit million dollar investment represents genuine skin in the game from a Nomura subsidiary that has committed structuring and risk oversight resources to the project.

ZIGChain’s $56-59 million market cap means liquidity is thin compared to larger RWA-focused protocols. ZIGChain isn’t the only project chasing tokenized private credit, and larger platforms with deeper TVL and more established track records are already in the market. The quality of the underlying loan book will ultimately determine whether this initiative attracts the kind of institutional capital needed to hit the $100 million TVL threshold.