Bitcoin Adoption Fund launched by Japan’s $500B Nomura bank

Japan’s largest invest­ment bank Nomura’s dig­i­tal asset sub­sidiary Laser Dig­i­tal Asset Man­age­ment has launched a Bit­coin Adop­tion Fund for insti­tu­tion­al investors. 

The offi­cial announce­ment not­ed the Bit­coin-based fund will be the first in a range of dig­i­tal adop­tion invest­ment solu­tions that the firm plans to introduce.

Nomu­ra is a Japan­ese finan­cial giant with over $500 bil­lion worth of assets and offers bro­ker­age ser­vices to lead­ing intu­ition­al investors. The Bit­coin fund launched by its dig­i­tal asset arm will now offer investors direct expo­sure to Bit­coin for investors.

The Laser Dig­i­tal Bit­coin Adop­tion Fund offers long-only expo­sure to Bit­coin. The finan­cial giant has cho­sen Komainu as the reg­u­lat­ed cus­tody part­ner. The Bit­coin Fund is a por­tion of Laser Dig­i­tal Funds Seg­re­gat­ed Port­fo­lio Com­pa­ny that has been reg­is­tered as a mutu­al fund in accor­dance with in con­junc­tion with the Cay­man Islands Reg­u­la­to­ry Authority.

Laser Dig­i­tal Asset Man­age­ment head Sebas­t­ian Gugli­et said that Bit­coin is one of the enablers of this long-last­ing trans­for­ma­tion­al change and long-term expo­sure to Bit­coin offers a solu­tion to investors to cap­ture this macro trend.

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The Bit­coin adop­tion fund might be the first of its kind launched by Nomu­ra and its dig­i­tal asset arm, but the Japan­ese invest­ment bank­ing giant has been invest­ing in the dig­i­tal asset ecosys­tem for quite some time already. In Sep­tem­ber 2022, the firm launched its dig­i­tal asset ven­ture cap­i­tal arm to stay at the fore­front of dig­i­tal inno­va­tion. Ear­li­er in August this year, Nomura’s cryp­to arm Laser Dig­i­tal also won Dubai’s Vir­tu­al Asset Reg­u­la­to­ry Author­i­ty (VARA) license to oper­ate in the country.

The long only Bit­coin Adop­tion fund for investors in Japan comes amid a grow­ing dis­cus­sion around Bit­coin based invest­ment prod­ucts from reg­u­lat­ed and main­stream finan­cial giants. The Unit­ed States Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion approved two Bit­coin based futures ETF even though there is a delayed deci­son on spot Bit­coin ETFs. Apart from U.S. Cana­da and Europe has also approved sev­er­al Bitocin focused invest­ment prod­ucts over the past cou­ple of years.

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