Libre Capital

Libre Capital is a fintech and Web3 venture that built infrastructure to bring institutional-grade private market investments onto public blockchains. Founded as a joint venture between WebN Group — Brevan Howard's fintech incubation hub — and Laser Digital, Nomura's digital assets subsidiary, the platform targeted a structural gap in global finance: access to premium alternative investment funds had historically required both accreditation and minimum commitments running into the millions of dollars. Libre set out to dissolve those barriers by tokenizing the funds themselves and making them natively tradeable onchain.

In July 2025, Libre Capital rebranded as KAIO, reflecting a strategic shift from a single-chain fund issuance platform toward a sovereign AppChain built specifically for the broader real-world asset (RWA) ecosystem. The underlying mission and team remained unchanged; the rebrand marked an expansion in scope and an infrastructure-first positioning.

The Problem

Private credit, hedge fund strategies, and institutional money market funds have long been the preserve of endowments, sovereign wealth funds, and ultra-high-net-worth investors. Even where accreditation requirements are met, minimum subscriptions, lockup periods, cumbersome transfer restrictions, and geographic fragmentation keep most investors out. Meanwhile, on the blockchain side, DeFi's native yield instruments carry counterparty risk profiles unsuitable for treasury management or conservative capital allocation. Libre Capital identified the gap: institutional asset managers had high-quality products but poor distribution; DeFi investors had capital but no compliant, liquid access to institutional yield.

How It Works

Libre Capital originally launched through the Libre Gateway, a decentralized application deployed on public blockchains that allows eligible investors — accredited, professional, and institutional — to subscribe to tokenized fund positions in a fully compliant flow. KYC, AML checks, and jurisdictional eligibility are verified upfront; once approved, investors receive onchain tokens representing their fund position.

Under the KAIO architecture, this process is structured across three layers:

• Infrastructure Layer: A sovereign AppChain manages all fund operations — subscriptions, redemptions, net asset value calculation, and compliance record-keeping — outside the congestion constraints of general-purpose chains.
• Compliance Engine: Every transaction is screened against a modular compliance engine with jurisdiction-specific safeguards embedded at the smart contract level. Regulatory requirements are programmatic rather than procedural.
• Product Layer: Specific tokenized funds are deployed as distinct onchain instruments, each with its own token ticker, minimum subscription, and liquidity profile.

A defining feature of the architecture is omnichain interoperability. Tokenized fund positions can move across more than ten blockchains — including Solana, Ethereum, Base, Sui, Polygon, Arbitrum, Sei, Injective, and TON — while retaining their compliance wrapper. This enables cross-chain collateral use, lending, and secondary market liquidity without forfeiting investor permissioning.

Tokenized Fund Products

At launch and through subsequent expansion, the platform has offered five tokenized investment products:

• CASH — BlackRock's ICS US Dollar Liquidity Fund, a money market vehicle with a $100 minimum and near-immediate settlement. This brings institutional treasury management onto public blockchains at retail-accessible entry points.
• SCOPE — Hamilton Lane's Senior Credit Opportunities Fund, a private credit evergreen vehicle targeting consistent cash yield through senior secured positions. The fund launched on Solana in July 2024 with a $10,000 minimum and monthly liquidity options.
• VOLT — Laser Digital's market-neutral crypto basis trading strategy, offering yield generated from digital asset markets with a $10,000 minimum.
• MACRO — Brevan Howard's flagship multi-strategy hedge fund, tokenized with a $10,000 minimum and institutional trading mandates.
• MCAS — Mubadala Capital's private equity and alternatives strategy, targeting longer-duration private market returns with a $100,000 minimum.

The platform also launched the Laser Digital Bitcoin Diversified Yield Fund, which had secured over $100 million in capital commitments, targeting crypto-native yield for Bitcoin holders within a regulated structure.

Solana Ecosystem Role

Solana was one of the earliest chains supported by the Libre Gateway, and the July 2024 SCOPE launch on Solana represented one of the first deployments of a major institutional private credit fund on the network. Hamilton Lane's Head of Digital Assets cited Libre's role as a leader in the tokenization of private markets funds; Libre's CEO described the Solana launch as "a huge step forward to enable access to wealth and treasury management tools."

The deployment on Solana was a meaningful data point in the network's institutional DeFi narrative. Solana's throughput, low transaction costs, and composability made it an attractive distribution layer for fund tokens that need to be usable as DeFi collateral — a use case requiring frequent small transactions that would be cost-prohibitive on Ethereum mainnet.

The KAIO protocol continues to support Solana as one of its primary distribution chains, with Mubadala Capital's MCAS product available on Solana, Base, and Sui.

Funding and Backing

Libre Capital raised an $11 million seed round led by Laser Digital and WebN Group, with participation from Karatage, Further Ventures, Lyrik Ventures, and Brevan Howard Digital. Following the rebrand to KAIO, the company secured an additional $19 million strategic round backed by Tether, Laser Digital, and Brevan Howard.

The company also announced a collaboration with the TON Foundation on a $500 million Telegram Bond Fund, expanding the addressable market for compliant tokenized yields to Telegram's global user base.

Token

KAIO introduced the $KAIO governance and utility token with a fixed supply of 10 billion tokens. The token serves governance functions, protocol staking, and provides access to platform features. Token allocation prioritizes community incentives at 37.5% of supply, with the remainder distributed across ecosystem development and contributor vesting schedules.

Traction

By mid-2026, the KAIO ecosystem reported approximately $95.6 million in total value locked and more than $500 million in cumulative transactions processed through its infrastructure. Individual fund products — CASH, SCOPE, VOLT, MACRO, and MCAS — collectively held significant assets under management across all supported chains.

Team and Governance

The platform emerged from the institutional finance and digital assets heritage of its two founding organizations. WebN Group provides the fintech and regulatory structuring experience; Laser Digital contributes digital asset infrastructure and distribution reach through Nomura's global institutional network. The asset management partners — BlackRock, Hamilton Lane, Brevan Howard, Mubadala Capital — lend product credibility and regulatory standing to the tokenized instruments themselves.

Libre Capital's trajectory — from a Solana-native private credit gateway in 2024 to a multi-chain institutional RWA AppChain with over half a billion dollars in processed transactions — represents one of the more complete attempts to build regulated, composable access to private markets at the infrastructure layer.