By
Chimamanda U. Martha
April 17th, 2024
Investment bank Nomura is not eyeing NFTs and DeFi for now, but they’re surely in its plans.
Earlier this week, Japanese investment bank Nomura announced that it had created a unit that will be focused on crypto assets. The move was part of its efforts to gain an edge over its European and American rivals. Especially at a time when banks are beginning to test the waters of crypto.
Interestingly, however, the unit seems to be ready to swing into action immediately. And going by the statement of its CEO, Jez Mohideen, the subsidiary of Nomura already has a roadmap it intends to work with.
Now, speaking about the unit’s roadmap, Mohideen claims it will begin its duties by focusing only on the top cryptocurrencies for now. He then added that the unit will only look into other aspects of digital assets applications like non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralized finance (DeFi), sometime in the near future.
Meanwhile, Mohideen claims that Nomura will soon come up with a name for the unit, which will be located in Europe.
Mohideen was quick to note, however, that looking into NFTs and DeFi may well be dependent on certain conditions. That is, creating DeFi markets must be necessitated by significant institutional demand.
Nomura Has No Reservations about Crypto
For what it’s worth, Nomura is not restricting itself concerning the crypto services it intends to offer. And this has been a major strong point for the investment bank. While many banks have stuck to only trading, Nomura has always been clear about going all-in with crypto.
Recently, Nomura innovatively partnered with investment fund CoinShares and storage expert Ledger. Through that partnership, the investment bank notably became one of the first to explore how to safely store crypto assets with the Komainu custody consortium.
Further confirming that Nomura was always prepared for any possible outcome in the industry, Mohideen talked about the Komainu project. He said:
“Komainu is one of our first projects, where we learned a lot about the bottlenecks of this industry.”
What to Expect before NFTs and DeFI
As earlier mentioned, Nomura’s shift towards DeFi and NFTs will be dependent on institutional interest. But the reason may not be far-fetched. As is well known, companies are required to properly verify the identities of their traders. This is to comply with existing anti-money laundering (AML) regulations.
Therefore, the unit will only be open to DeFi pools that already offer proper know-your-customer (KYC) and whitelisting. And a good example of that is the Aave Arc.
About NFTs, Nomura will carefully examine its infrastructure and decide if it will be a worthy venture. But of course, all that will happen sometime later, as the bank looks to bridge the gap between Web 3 and traditional finance.