Hamilton Lane announces launch of first private credit fund on Solana blockchain.
Hamilton Lane, an alternative investment management firm, has launched the Senior Credit Opportunities Fund (SCOPE) on the Solana blockchain. This move makes Hamilton Lane the first major investment manager to put its funds on the blockchain network.
The launch is a collaboration between Hamilton Lane and Libre, a Brevan Howard and Nomura-backed Web3 protocol. This partnership enables Hamilton Lane to leverage Libre’s technology to issue and distribute its funds on-chain.
Nick Ducoff, head of institutional growth at Solana Foundation, noted that integrating SCOPE on the blockchain is a significant step towards democratizing finance. This aims to bring institutional finance to more investors, not just high-net-worth individuals.
“Libre’s announcement of an onchain fund with Hamilton Lane and Brevan Howard – two stalwarts of alternative investments – is yet another revelation in the changing democratization of finance. Bringing real world assets onchain provides more flexibility and access to investors around the world,” Ducoff said in a blog post.
The announcement by Hamilton Lane and Libre is part of a growing trend of using blockchain to tokenize funds. This shift has seen major players like BlackRock turning to blockchain to bring real-world assets (RWAs) on-chain.
According to Ducoff, onchain RWAs broadly represent traditional securities such as private funds, money market funds, and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). RWAs also include financial assets like private credit and real estate, tokenized or linked to an onchain asset.
Libre provides the infrastructure for firms to bring RWAs to users with added benefits like trading and collateralized lending.
Solana is a “low latency” network, offering high throughput capability sought by companies for tokenization.
Hamilton Lane has previously tokenized its SCOPE fund on Securitize, a U.S.-based digital securities issuance platform. Securitize is the transfer agent and broker-dealer for BlackRock’s BUIDL tokenized money market fund, which recently hit a $500 million market cap within four months of launch.
