TradFi giant EquiLend backs Digital Prime to link $40 trillion pool with tokenized markets

EquiLend, a securities finance utility giant with $40 trillion in lendable assets, said it made a "strategic" minority investment in Digital Prime Technologies, a regulated crypto financing provider.

The company said it is responding to client demand for governed, transparent workflows that can run straight from trading to post-trade processing and reporting across both traditional and digital instruments. It declined to say how much the investment was worth.

The partnership will center on Tokenet, Digital Prime’s institutional lending network. Tokenet supports multi-custodian and multi-collateral lifecycle management, exposure monitoring and institutional reporting, the companies said. Future phases include the introduction of regulated stablecoin collateral and additional tokenized instruments.

The move is about readiness for real-world asset tokenization, and not a pivot away from the EquiLend's core traditional finance client base, CEO Rich Grossi told CoinDesk

"The key point is that this investment is about readiness for this market trajectory," Grossi said. "We’ve spent years building infrastructure that supports transparency, governance and scale across traditional securities lending. As tokenized assets and digital instruments mature, we’re seeing those same institutional requirements emerge."

Grossi noted that while traditional finance (TradFi) remains the company's primary focus, it is seeing clients "consider expansion of asset classes," necessitating a bridge that offers "continuity across asset classes."

The cryptocurrency lending market has been dealing with the same issues the company started solving in the early 2000s, said EquiLend’s Chief Product Officer Nick Delikaris.

"Many of the challenges we see in digital asset financing mirror early-stage issues in traditional securities lending—fragmented workflows, limited collateral mobility and inconsistent post-trade processes," Delikaris said.

The timing of the deal follows the U.S.’s pro-crypto regulatory shift during the second Trump administration, with Grossi seeing a “growing alignment between traditional market infrastructure and digital asset regulation” as regulatory clarity grows.

"We’re seeing increased engagement from regulators, exchanges and market utilities around tokenization," Grossi said. "For EquiLend, that made this a sensible moment to invest."