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Stablecoin giant Tether has taken a historic step. It has, for the first time as lead investor, invested 8 million USD into an asset tokenization infrastructure company called KAIO. Participants in this strategic funding round also include Systemic Ventures, Further Ventures, and Laser Digital, a subsidiary of Nomura Securities. After the funding was completed, KAIO’s total fundraising reached 19 million USD.

The company plans to expand its business from fund tokenization to a broader range of asset classes such as credit products, structured instruments, and exchange-traded funds. At the same time, KAIO announced a partnership with Mubadala Capital, a subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, to jointly launch on-chain funds. This clearly indicates that Tether’s strategy is shifting from internal development to external direct investment.

KAIO’s predecessor was Libre Capital, which is essentially an infrastructure builder for underlying protocols of real-world assets. Its core mission is to build a sovereign application chain aimed at solving compliance, liquidity, and interoperability issues faced by institutional funds when on-chain. It does not directly issue assets but provides technical infrastructure for large asset management firms to distribute products on-chain through compliant tokenization structures.

Currently, its platform hosts fund products from BlackRock, Brevan Howard, and Hamilton Lane, deployed on multiple networks such as $SUI, $SOL, and $BASE. The platform has processed over 500 million USD in transactions, with a tokenized asset scale of about 100 million USD. By embedding regulatory rules into on-chain code, it successfully lowered the investment threshold for institutional funds to the minimum of 100 USD for qualified investors. In February this year, it also launched a yield token product called KASH, bundling blue-chip funds from BlackRock and other institutions.

KAIO’s team has a background spanning traditional finance and the crypto space. CEO Shrey Rastogi previously worked at McKinsey focusing on capital markets infrastructure research, while COO Olivier Dang has over ten years of experience at Nomura Securities and served as venture capital head at its digital asset subsidiary Laser Digital. This diverse background is key to connecting with mainstream financial institutions.

Tether’s involvement is directly related to its large scale. Shortly after KAIO announced the funding, the market cap of its issued $USDT reached a record high of approximately 188 billion USD. Meanwhile, the total market cap of global stablecoins first surpassed 320 billion USD, indicating a sharp expansion in on-chain liquidity demand.

According to Tether’s report as of 2025, its total reserve assets amount to approximately 192.88 billion USD, with liabilities around 186.54 billion USD, resulting in an excess reserve of about 6.4 billion USD. Over 70% of the reserves are US Treasuries and repurchase agreements. Throughout 2025, Tether recorded net profits exceeding 10 billion USD, providing a solid financial foundation for its strategic investments. Its goal may be to channel the liquidity of $USDT into regulated products such as BlackRock’s money market funds tokenized via the KAIO platform.

Partner Mubadala Capital has a strong background, with its parent company Mubadala Investment Company managing assets worth 385 billion USD, making it the 15th largest sovereign wealth fund globally. Since 2025, Mubadala Capital has actively explored compliant tokenization of private equity, real estate, and other strategies.

In terms of competition, KAIO faces several rivals. The institutional tokenization platform leader Securitize directly serves BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, with a tokenized asset total exceeding 4 billion USD. DeFi-native infrastructure Centrifuge focuses on compliant tokenization via special purpose vehicles and integrates with $AAVE, $MKR, with a total value locked of about 1.99 billion USD.

Nevertheless, with its sovereign chain architecture, deep integration into Abu Dhabi’s regulatory ecosystem, and exclusive partnership with Mubadala Capital, KAIO has found a differentiated foothold in the compliant digital asset markets in the Middle East and Asia.

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