Laser Digital, Nomura’s digital asset arm, has taken a strategic stake in ZIGChain and signed on as the structuring and risk-oversight partner for a UAE onchain private credit push, the companies . The Laser Digital ZIGChain investment is in the high single-digit millions of dollars. The two companies are targeting a minimum of $100 million in total value locked across their onchain credit vaults, $25 million by September and the full amount by the end of November 2026.
Laser Digital’s role goes beyond the investment itself. The Nomura subsidiary is structuring and overseeing risk for a pipeline of ZIGChain’s onchain private credit products, spanning private credit, SME financing, invoice factoring and stablecoin infrastructure, putting its own institutional risk management on the products rather than acting as a passive backer.
Dr Jez Mohideen, chief executive of Laser Digital, said: “The shared vision remains to make the next generation of asset management products accessible.” Abdul Rafay Gadit, co-founder of ZIGChain, said: “Laser is creating with us one of the largest on-chain products the Gulf countries have ever seen.”
How big the market actually is
Gadit’s “largest on-chain product” framing is worth measuring against the market it sits in. Onchain private credit held roughly $5 billion in distributed value as of March 2026, according to data tracker rwa.xyz, rising to $8 billion to $14 billion once broader counts of represented and platform-locked assets are included. That segment sits inside a wider tokenised real-world asset market that reached about $22 billion to $31 billion in assets under management by mid-2026, up from roughly $8 billion in January 2024.
Against that backdrop, a $100 million target is a meaningful addition to a market still in the low tens of billions globally, not a rounding error, but it is not the outsized claim “largest ever” might suggest on its own.
The gap between a company’s framing of an opportunity and the market’s actual current size is a recurring pattern in this sector. Mubadala Capital and Coinbase-backed KAIO drew the same distinction when it launched a tokenised private markets fund on Base, Solana and Sui in July 2026, pitching a “$30 trillion opportunity” that sits well above the tokenised RWA market’s actual current size.
Three years of UAE groundwork, not a fresh entry
Laser Digital was and is headquartered in Switzerland, with an existing UAE presence. It in September 2023, covering broker-dealer and asset/fund management services for both virtual and traditional assets. This deal builds on that groundwork rather than marking a new UAE market entry.
ZIGChain is a layer 1 blockchain founded by a Karachi-based team led by Gadit, built around Shariah-compliant infrastructure for tokenised real-world assets. It already has a tokenised-fund alliance with Apex Group, a crypto-friendly fund administrator, dating to July 2025, and runs Zamanat, a real-world asset tokenisation platform designed to avoid interest-bearing structures under Islamic finance principles.
Shariah compliance means structuring credit products without riba, interest charged simply for lending money, which Islamic finance treats as prohibited. In practice, that means replacing a conventional interest-bearing loan with structures such as a profit-sharing arrangement, where a financier and borrower split returns on an underlying asset or venture, rather than the financier charging a fixed rate regardless of outcome. Building that into a private credit vault at protocol level, rather than adapting it deal by deal, is the specific technical bet Zamanat is making.
What the deal doesn’t say yet
The $100 million target comes with dated checkpoints, a specific detail most crypto partnership announcements don’t offer. What isn’t disclosed is who the vaults’ borrowers actually are, or how credit risk gets assessed once real capital moves through them.
Onchain private credit’s pitch is connecting borrowers shut out of traditional bank financing with capital holders who lack access to institutional private credit funds. Whether ZIGChain’s vaults reach that underserved borrower base, rather than digitising credit for borrowers who already have bank access, is a claim that becomes checkable only once the vaults are live and the September total-value-locked checkpoint arrives.
