A newly launched fund in Dubai’s International Financial Centre is lending directly to UK law firms and claims management companies, using tokens issued on Ethereum to represent the fund inte
A newly launched fund in Dubai’s International Financial Centre is lending directly to UK law firms and claims management companies, using tokens issued on Ethereum to represent the fund interests themselves rather than the underlying loans. Seven Stars Fund CEIC, incorporated in the DIFC on June 29 and regulated by the Dubai Financial Services Authority as an Exempt Fund, targets £250 million with a hard cap of £400 million, and is described by its backers as the first DFSA-regulated fund built specifically around specialty private credit for UK law firms.
The fund provides full-recourse, senior-secured lending facilities to SRA-regulated UK law firms and FCA-authorized claims management companies pursuing what the fund’s own materials describe as precedent-backed consumer redress claims, covering categories including motor finance mis-selling, payment protection insurance claims, irresponsible lending, pension transfer disputes and housing disrepair cases. These are high-volume categories where a law firm or claims manager typically needs working capital to carry a large caseload through to settlement rather than a single large loan against one case.
Source:Asset Servicing Times on X
What distinguishes Seven Stars Fund CEIC from a conventional private credit vehicle is how investors hold their stake in it. Participating shares are issued as SST Tokens built to the ERC-3643 standard, a token format specifically designed for regulated securities rather than general-purpose crypto assets. Every investor wallet is tied to an on-chain identity record carrying verified claims, such as accreditation status or jurisdiction, and the token’s smart contract checks those claims before allowing any transfer to go through. A transfer to an unverified wallet simply fails. Tokeny S.à r.l., majority-owned by Apex Group, operates the token platform, while Apex Fund Services (Dubai) Ltd. administers the fund. Access is restricted to Professional Clients through private placement, meaning retail investors cannot buy in directly.
Leon Clarance, chief strategy officer at Seven Stars, said Apex Group’s “expertise in both traditional fund administration and digital assets” made it “the ideal partner for this groundbreaking initiative,” adding that the infrastructure would let the fund “deliver the operational efficiency gains of tokenisation while maintaining the rigorous compliance and reporting standards our institutional investors expect.”
Norton Rose Fulbright confirmed to DeFi Planet that it advised Truleum Venture Partners Limited, the DFSA-authorized entity managing the fund, on the launch. The firm’s funds team was led by partner Geoffroy Hermanns, supported by counsel Shakir Mogalia and associates Dale Deplitch, Bita Mozafari and Bryan O’Shea, with partner Matthew Shanahan advising on regulatory matters. Hermanns said the launch “demonstrates how tokenization can be incorporated into a regulated private credit fund structure,” calling it the product of bringing the firm’s funds and regulatory experience together in “a rapidly evolving area of the market.”
Norton Rose confirmation to DeFi Planet.
Litigation finance has operated as an institutional asset class for years through firms like Burford Capital, Omni Bridgeway, Therium and Augusta, typically funding a case directly in exchange for a share of any award. What Seven Stars Fund CEIC represents is a different model within the same broader space, lending against a portfolio of claims rather than betting on individual case outcomes, and doing so through a fund structure regulated like any other private credit vehicle rather than through bespoke litigation funding agreements.
Dubai’s regulators have been positioning the emirate for exactly this kind of structure, though through two separate regimes. Seven Stars Fund CEIC itself is regulated by the DFSA within the DIFC, a financial free zone with its own rulebook independent of Dubai’s broader virtual asset regulator, VARA. VARA separately maintains a Category 1 licensing framework for Asset-Referenced Virtual Assets, tokens tied to real-world assets, which applies across Dubai’s mainland and other free zones outside the DIFC, underscoring how central tokenized real-world asset structures have become to Dubai’s regulatory agenda more broadly, even where a specific fund like this one sits under a different regulator.
The claims categories Seven Stars Fund CEIC is financing are not abstract. Motor finance mis-selling alone refers to the commission claims that have forced UK lenders to set aside billions in redress provisions since regulators found widespread undisclosed commission arrangements between car dealers and finance providers. Payment protection insurance claims, pension transfer disputes and housing disrepair cases have each generated their own waves of consumer redress activity in the UK over the past decade. A fund built to provide working capital against portfolios of exactly these claim types is targeting a financing gap that already exists at meaningful scale, rather than manufacturing demand that tokenization itself is supposed to create.
Tokenized private credit has grown into the largest segment of real-world asset tokenization outside stablecoins, and the numbers help explain why a regulator like the DFSA is now willing to approve a fund built entirely around it.
Platform or fund What it tokenizes Structure Reported scale Token standard Seven Stars Fund CEIC Senior-secured lending to UK law firms and claims managers DFSA-regulated Exempt Fund, DIFC-domiciled £250 million target, £400 million hard cap ERC-3643 Figure Consumer and home equity loan originations Lending platform, not a regulated closed-end fund $12.78 billion in loan originations, roughly 92% of active tokenized private credit Proprietary blockchain infrastructure Tradable Trade finance and private credit loans Lending platform on zkSync Era $4.72 billion in originations zkSync Era-based Maple Finance Institutional and corporate private credit DeFi lending protocol $3.38 billion in originations Ethereum-based TrueFi Uncollateralized corporate lending DeFi lending protocol $1.72 billion in originations Ethereum-basedFigure, Tradable, Maple Finance and TrueFi are loan-origination platforms where the tokenization happens at the level of individual loans or pools of loans. Seven Stars Fund CEIC tokenizes the fund itself, a structure closer to a traditional private credit fund with a blockchain-based cap table than to an on-chain lending protocol. Across the category as a whole, AMINA UK’s own research estimated tokenized real-world assets excluding stablecoins at $27.05 billion as of March 2026, with on-chain private lending alone having crossed $20 billion.
It is a DFSA-regulated, DIFC-domiciled private credit fund that provides senior-secured, asset-backed financing to UK law firms and claims management companies working on portfolios of consumer redress claims, with fund interests issued as tokens rather than conventional shares.
What does ERC-3643 mean for investors in this fund?ERC-3643 is a token standard built for regulated securities. It ties every investor’s wallet to a verified on-chain identity and enforces eligibility rules, such as professional investor status, directly at the point of transfer, so a token cannot move to a wallet that hasn’t been verified.
Can retail investors buy into Seven Stars Fund CEIC?No. The fund is offered through private placement to Professional Clients only, the same restriction that applies to most institutional private credit vehicles.
How big is the tokenized private credit market?Estimates vary by what is being measured. Private Equity Wire put active tokenized private credit loans at roughly $13.88 billion, while AMINA UK’s analysis placed broader tokenized real-world assets, excluding stablecoins, at $27.05 billion as of March 2026.
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The post Dubai-Regulated Fund Turns UK Legal Claims Into Tokenized Private Credit appeared first on DeFi Planet.
