Lithuania-Licensed Crypto Bank Meld to Offer Tokenized RWAs to Retail Investors

• Meld plans to offer lending and borrowing against real-world assets in partnership with DeFi platform Swarm.
• Swarm, which is licensed with the financial German regulator, set up an RWA trading platform in December last year.
• Meld has a VASP license in Lithuania.

Crypto-friendly bank Meld plans to soon offer lending and borrowing against tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) to retail investors, which could allow them to "ape more into bitcoin."

The bank, which is in partnership with the layer-1 blockchain of the same name, has signed a memorandum of understanding with decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Swarm Markets, a spokesperson told CoinDesk via email.

Swarm, which is licensed in Germany by financial regulator BaFin, started a permissionless RWA trading platform last December. Meld is using Swarm's platform as a means of offering on-chain lending and borrowing for these assets, opening up cross-asset margining opportunities for retail investors that are not available today through traditional methods.

"This could be really interesting as we go into the next bull run, where people can lend against their stocks to ape more into bitcoin, for example," the Swarm spokesperson said.

The partnership with Meld could see a large retail user base access tokenized RWAs through a licensed banking service. Meld recently secured its virtual asset service provider (VASP) license in Lithuania, which in theory should make it easier for it to win equivalent licenses in other European Union member states, thanks to the bloc's Market in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulation.

Tokenized RWAs, which refers to the trading of "traditional" asset classes such as stocks, bonds and even real estate on blockchains, is expected to become a multitrillion dollar business in some quarters of the crypto industry.

Meld has had 75,000 prospective customers sign up for early access to its platform.

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