Within a matter of days Japan’s SBI Holdings announced two investments in tokenized trading venues. The larger investment is ¥8 billion ($50m) in Startale Group, with whom SBI has previously announced developing a joint venture Strium, a blockchain designed as a securities issuance and trading infrastructure with global ambitions. The second investment involved purchasing a 20% stake in Digital Securities (DS) from existing investors. DS is a blockchain based issuer and asset manager with a trading platform subsidiary Ownership, which is mainly active in transactions involving tokenized real estate funds so far.
SBI has sprawling interests in tokenization entities across the spectrum. While these two investments appear to have an overlap, they are quite distinctive. Strium is a blockchain infrastructure where the trading venues will be on chain and its roots are more web3 and crypto native, with Startale as the founder of the Astar Network and partner to Sony’s Soneium blockchain. Rather than separating institutional and retail infrastructures, its goal is hybrid access, with institutional participants permissioned and professional and retail traders accessing in a permissionless fashion. Its ambitions are global.
This type of trading venue contrasts with SBI founded Start, part of the Osaka Digital Exchange (ODX), a Japanese institutional trading venue for tokenized securities. ODX and Start are the equivalent of a US alternative trading system, with securities firms as members.
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