Participants in Cetif Advisory’s DeFi asset tokenization project include Polygon Labs and Fireblocks.
The Italian central bank’s Milano Hub innovation center will support a project by Cetif Advisory to explore a securities token ecosystem for institutional decentralized financial services (DeFi).
While the project has no “commercial intentions,” it will “expand the scope of research” next to include the use of securities tokens in secondary markets. Securities tokens are digitized securitizations of interests in real assets, such as stocks. Imanuel Baharier, managing director of Cetif Advisory, explains in a related statement:
“We believe it is critical to set the stage for DeFi to become a safe and open business for institutional firms.”
The project is designed to enable institutional market participants to operate in a DeFi environment while complying with regulatory guidelines. To do so, it will further develop Cetif Advisory’s Lionity platform, which the company describes as an “automated market maker for institutional investors.”
Cetif Advisory is an offshoot of the Cetif Research Center at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. The project is a collaboration with Polygon Labs, Fireblocks and other companies. Several Italian banks, asset management companies and 10 financial institutions are on board as participants.
Cetif Advisory’s DeFi project was selected in the second round of the Innovation Center of the Italian Central Bank. In the process, the project was one of seven that received the green light in the Fintech category. It will receive six months of support from the Innovation Hub in Milan, starting this month, in the form of expert advice and regulatory research.
Tokenization of securities is an emerging area of blockchain technology. Citi Global Perspectives & Solutions recently predicted that the tokenized securities market could be worth between $4 trillion and $5 trillion by 2030, with private equity and venture capital tokenized the most, followed by real estate.
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