Sydney-based digital asset manager and adviser TCM and technology developer Trovio have merged to form a $200 million entity, scooping up $20 million in fresh capital as the company expands its institutional-grade crypto business throughout the Asia-Pacific region.
Led by Ellerston Capital, Sun Hung Kai Strategic Capital and Amherst Holdings, the new combined entity called Trovio Group aims to bridge the gap between traditional finance and the emerging digital asset and web 3.0 ecosystems, through advice and the licensing of proprietary tokenisation technology.
“There’s a lot of ways to make money in digital assets,” said Jon Deane, chief executive of the merged entity.
“But it’s how you enable the gateway for clients so they can interact with the ecosystem without creating reputation risk for them that is a really fast-growing segment for us.”
Trovio operates on an assumption that all assets will eventually transact in a digital format, and institutional players are already looking for partners to “digitise” their commodity or carbon industries and use tokenisation to enable clear provenance of assets.
The business largely has three arms: asset management, advisory and licensing.
The asset management arm operates with a focus on decentralised finance, or DeFi, protocols where investors can pledge money and create liquidity for other projects in return for a fee.
Through the advisory arm, firms are given a clear understanding of how underlying crypto-technology is powering new and emerging investment opportunities or how firms can use the technology itself to upgrade.
Trovio licenses its own proprietary tokenisation technology that evolved out of a previous business called DigiCash, a 1990s protocol that pioneered the first digital currencies.
“We are disrupting that commodity trade, in that we’re disintermediating that central layer that needs some counterparties like a bank to perform some sort of transaction,” Mr Deane said.
“And we’re passing that revenue attribution back to the people who actually own the assets in the first place.”
Trovio will be headquartered in Singapore, though Mr Deane will run the organisation from Sydney for now.
Earlier this year, Mr Deane launched Trovio’s Digital Asset Income Fund, which is set to house $US60 million by January 1.
More broadly, Trovio raised $6 million in January at a $26 million post valuation.
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