Amid rising bullishness on stablecoins and other forms of digital asset, Credit Saison's CVC has launched a $50m fund to invest in DeFi tech.
Qin En Looi, photo courtesy of LinkedIn
Japanese consumer credit company Credit Saison’s investment arm has launched a fund that will invest in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.
The fund, Onigiri Capital, will be part of Saison Capital and is backed by Credit Saison and several Asian financial institutions, which have not been publicly disclosed. It has raised $35m of its $50m target.
It was set up by Saison Capital partner Qin En Looi, who will run it as managing partner alongside Hans De Back, who is also a VC investor for various firms. Areas the fund will invest in include stablecoins, tokenisation, payments and infrastructure to bridge traditional finance with blockchain-based innovations.
This comes amid rising enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies such as stablecoins as they look set to gain wider adoption in the US under the pro-crypto Trump administration, which has helped to legitimise them in other markets. Banks and financial institutions globally are working to adopt digital asset innovation including through VC investment and venture building.
Saison Capital is a sector-agnostic CVC unit headquartered in Singapore. Before Onigiri was set up it had made some investments in crypto and blockchain technologies, including by taking part in the $4m series A funding round for India’s LogX, a multichain decentralised trading platform.
At the GCVi Summit in Monterey earlier this year, Qin En Looi said he believed blockchain technology could bring the speed of the internet to a global financial system that is still beset by slow payment methods.
