Introduction
We are thrilled to be backing Aaron Gwak and the Libeara team alongside GSR and Solowin Holdings (NASDAQ: AXG), a syndicate that spans institutional liquidity, digital-asset distribution and global listed markets.
Money is moving online in a fundamentally new way. Stocks, bonds and funds are beginning to live directly on public blockchains, replacing the existing infrastructure. In the tradfi world, every fund subscription, coupon payment and asset transfer still passes through layers of custodians, transfer agents and clearing houses, each taking a cut and each a potential point of failure. While these intermediaries were originally added to manage scale, they have created a layered infrastructure that is now increasingly fragile and inefficient. The old plumbing of capital markets - two-day settlement cycles, paper-heavy fund operations and roughly US$50 billion lost each year to manual reconciliation - is being rewritten in software. Now, more than US$36 billion in real-world assets already sit on the public blockchains, having grown over 17x since 2022, with BCG projecting that figure will reach US$16 trillion by 2030.
Our thesis is that the winners of this shift will be the platforms that pair the speed and flexibility of crypto or decentralized finance with the safety and legal certainty of traditional finance. Libeara is one of a handful of companies anywhere in the world with the regulatory foundation and real-world traction to do it, and the only one of its kind built natively in Asia. By bringing settlement, compliance and record-keeping onto a single shared ledger, Aaron and his team are not patching the old system; they are rebuilding it for a onchain-first era.
What pulled us in was a rare combination:
- Regulatory credence
- Libeara has been built inside the existing securities laws of Singapore, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. The company was recently granted a Capital Markets Services licence by the Monetary Authority of Singapore – a bar very few in this space have cleared.
- A tokenised fund issued on Libeara carries the same legal rights as any regulated security, something most crypto-native issuers still cannot credibly offer.
- Customer trust
- Over US$1 billion in assets are already live on the platform, including the world’s highest-rated tokenised U.S. Treasury fund with Wellington Management, and Asia’s first retail tokenised money market fund with ChinaAMC Hong Kong
- World class team
- Founder and CEO Aaron Gwak spent 21 years in capital markets and executed more than US$180 billion in bond transactions before starting Libeara.
- Aaron and his team are not observing traditional finance from the outside; they built it, and are now rebuilding it.
The business model behind all of this is what great infrastructure companies look like in their early innings: every dollar of assets that comes onto the platform creates recurring revenue, and once an institution plugs in, it rarely leaves. This round gives Libeara the firepower to expand across asset classes, geographies and investor types.
We are proud to be on this journey with Aaron and the Libeara team, and honoured to join a syndicate that shares our conviction: the next generation of financial infrastructure will be built by those who pair regulatory rigour with the openness of the internet.
About Libeara
Libeara is a full-stack, regulation-first on-chain capital markets platform bridging traditional finance and web3. Incubated by Standard Chartered’s SC Ventures, Libeara combines institutional-grade compliance with blockchain innovation.The company operates with a "bank-grade" DNA that ensures the highest standards of institutional governance and operational resilience. To date, Libeara’s technology has supported the issuance of over US$1 billion in regulated on-chain assets, including a top-rated tokenized U.S. Treasury fund and the first retail money market fund in Asia. By replacing outdated legacy processes with atomic T+0 settlement and multi-chain interoperability, Libeara is bridging the gap between traditional finance and crypto-native liquidity. The platform provides a transparent and legally enforceable path for institutions to scale digital-native assets while maintaining absolute regulatory certainty.
