Hamilton Lane With $900B AUM Unveils SCOPE Fund on Solana

Hamilton Lane, one of the largest investment firms globally with over $900 billion in assets under management, announced the launch of its private credit fund on the Solana blockchain on Tuesday. Investors can now access the firm’s Senior Credit Opportunities Fund (SCOPE) via Solana, according to a press release shared with BSCN.

Hamilton Lane has partnered with Libre, a Web3 protocol for issuing and distributing funds on-chain, to facilitate this move. Libre is a joint venture between hedge fund Brevan Howard’s WebN Group and financial services giant Nomura’s Laser Digital. 

This partnership aims to tokenize SCOPE, offering deeper distribution by accessing "mass affluent, crypto-native" traders, according to Libre's CEO, Dr. Avtar Sehra.

This isn’t Hamilton Lane’s first blockchain venture. The firm previously tokenized SCOPE and an equity fund via digital securities issuance platform Securitize. 

Benefits of Tokenization

Tokenizing the SCOPE fund allows Hamilton Lane to attract a new audience. Libre’s infrastructure connects tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) to users, enabling accredited, professional, and institutional investors on networks like Solana to directly access top-tier funds on-chain in a fully compliant manner. This includes ancillary services for secondary trading and collateralized lending where available.

"Libre's launch on Solana democratizes access to high quality financial products with lower minimums to a global investor base,” said Nick Ducoff, Head of Institutional Growth at the Solana Foundation. “By leveraging the Solana blockchain's high performance, speed, and security, Libre enables accredited investors to access a wide range of top-tier private funds directly onchain.”

Libre’s integration with Solana will provide users access to the on-chain Hamilton Lane SCOPE fund, as well as the Brevan Howard Master Fund and Blackrock ICS Money Market Fund. This expansion marks the first institutional alternative RWA fund on Solana. Prior to the public launch, the expansion had garnered nearly $20 million in total locked value (TVL).

Solana’s Appeal

Solana’s low latency and high throughput capabilities make it a compelling network for tokenization. Before now, Solana users could access tokenized funds through Ondo Finance, which tokenizes U.S. Treasury bills. 

Ondo launched yield-bearing USDY and OUSG on Solana, with OUSG backed by the $95 million BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund. However, Hamilton Lane’s SCOPE fund is the first institutional fund launched directly on Solana.

"Solana's importance to financial services is quite significant around secondary trading. They have developed the chain for capabilities of increasing throughput, so the number of transactions per second, and also the reduction of the latency between transactions," said Avtar Sehra

While SCOPE targets high net worth investors, some industry experts are skeptical about the demand for tokenized financing platforms. Issuers of tokenized private credit like Maple and Centrifuge have faced challenges selling to crypto natives, who often prefer assets with shorter lock-up periods and higher returns.