Involvement with crypto is spooking banks, but digital assets more generally remain attractive: Banks are still interested in letting their clients issue, transfer, settle, and safekeep tokenized equities, and startups are jockeying to provide infrastructure. 

Digital asset infrastructure firm Taurus has raised a $65 million Series B led by Credit Suisse, with participation from Deutsche Bank, Arab Bank Switzerland, and others.  

Taurus’ platform is built to issue, custody, and trade any digital assets, including tokenized assets and digital currencies, and its funding highlights how cryptocurrency’s issues haven’t dampened all blockchain-based projects. As Bain’s Thomas Olsen put it to Distilled recently: “Large financial institutions are seeing a window of opportunity” for Web3 this year because of crypto’s problems. 

Taurus says it works with more than 25 financial institutions and corporate clients, including Credit Suisse. 

Credit Suisse expects “to soon launch several digital asset services for clients both on the issuing and the investment side,” exec André Helfenstein said.  

Taurus cofounder Lamine Brahim tells Insights Distilled that one of Taurus’ advantages is that it’s regulated – its T-DX platform for trading tokenized securities obtained a license from Swiss regulator FINMA in 2021 – and that its platform’s tech stack allows it to execute quickly: 

“Taurus controls the full technology stack – software, hardware, cryptography, distributed systems – where others assemble,” Brahim said.  

It plans to use the fundraising to fuel international expansion. Meanwhile, Citi, BBVA, BNP Paribas, and DBS work with infrastructure firm Metaco, while State Street has a partnership with Copper.