Standard Chartered, SBI Holdings Establishing $100M Investment Firm Targeting Crypto Startups

Standard Chartered’s (STAN) venture arm is teaming up with Japanese financial services firm SBI Holdings to form an investment company with $100 million backing to target crypto startups.

SC Ventures and SBI Holdings’ Digital Asset Joint Venture investment company will be established in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and focus on firms in market infrastructure, risk and compliance, decentralized finance (DeFi) and tokenization, according to a Thursday email.

Standard Chartered has pivoted its crypto activities toward the UAE in recent months, choosing Dubai as the jurisdiction in which to start safeguarding digital assets for institutional clients in the first quarter of 2024. The region’s mature regulatory structure relative to other jurisdictions is one of the major factors attracting firms to establish operations there, the company has said.

Zodia Markets, a digital asset marketplace majority owned by Standard Chartered and also backed by SBI Holdings, received in-principle approval to act as a crypto broker-dealer in Abu Dhabi in September.