Taurus—a Swiss crypto platform for tokenizing assets—announced its integration with Polygon on Friday, allowing banks to “issue, book, and service,” tokenized assets on the speedy, proof-of-stake network.
The partnership creates another link between the crypto industry and the European banking segment, helping reimagine old-school financial instruments on a modern, relatively decentralized foundation.
“Building on Polygon [...] is a natural step for Taurus,” said Taurus CMO Victor Busson, in a prepared. “Our banking, consumer goods, and sports and entertainment clients can now benefit from low fees and faster transactions for any tokenization use cases: equity, debt, structured products, funds, NFTs.”
Polygon is a suite of solutions designed to scale Ethereum, which is the largest blockchain in terms of DeFi and NFT activity. Since transaction fees on Ethereum’s main blockchain can rise to unmanageable levels during high-demand periods, Polygon emerged as a low-fee alternative with swift settlement speeds.
According to Taurus, most tier-1 financial institutions are already interested in issuing tokenized securities, with an eye for “blockchain-agnostic and token-agnostic infrastructure.”
In an email to Decrypt, Taurus confirmed that 70% of its clients use its tokenization capabilities, a list that includes Arab Bank Switzerland, Credit Suisse, and Deutsche Bank.
“By embracing digital securities, financial institutions and issuers can make non-bankable assets bankable: concretely issue, transfer, and trade securities in an automated way by leveraging smart contract capabilities,” the company said. This includes programming the behavior of securities including “dividend payments, coupon payments, stock splits, [and] compliance rules.”
Colin Butler, Polygon’s Global Head of Institutional Capital, said in a statement that it's a “no-brainer” to tokenize real-world assets.
“The challenge is and always has been to build sufficiently advanced infrastructure to enable it,” he said, adding that the Taurus partnership will “create the foundation for robust opportunities in the tokenization space.”
Tokenized securities have even piqued the interest of Bitcoin-loving billionaire Michael Saylor, who has otherwise expressed skepticism of tokens and cryptos besides BTC itself.
At Bitcoin 2023, he suggested tokenizing stocks and ETFs so that individuals could personally custody them, “instead of leaving them locked up with a centralized custodian.”
Tokenized securities on Ethereum, Polygon, and Gnosis reached a $225 million market cap in May, including securities from firms like Matrixport, Backed Finance, Ondo, and Franklin Templeton.
The latter company turned to Polygon in April as a host for its tokenized, Nasdaq-listed OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX).