S&P Global has led a strategic investment that takes crypto data provider Kaiko’s Series B funding to $110 million, with banks, exchanges and trading firms joining the round.
The deal includes BNP Paribas, Nasdaq Ventures, Royal Bank of Canada, Coinbase Ventures, DRW, Susquehanna, Broadridge, Stellar and Bpifrance, among others.
Kaiko previously raised $53 million in a 2022 Series B led by Eight Roads. However, the breadth of the latest investor group may be more significant than the total raised, bringing together organisations involved in pricing, banking, trading, market infrastructure and blockchain development.
The investment suggests traditional financial institutions are moving beyond testing tokenisation and are beginning to finance the infrastructure needed for markets that operate onchain around the clock.
Kaiko supplies institutional market data from more than 150 exchanges and protocols. Its newer infrastructure business sends data directly to smart contracts and turns blockchain activity into standardised information for banks and asset managers to use in valuation, trading and risk management.
That service is expected to become increasingly important as assets including Treasury bills, money-market funds, equities and bonds move on to blockchain networks.
“These are partners, not just shareholders,” Kaiko chief executive Ambre Soubiran said in the announcement. “Together we will define how institutional money moves onchain.”
The investors will also take part in a Kaiko-led Strategic Industry Working Group, which will help develop data standards for tokenised markets.
S&P Global involvement
S&P Global’s participation is another indication that established financial-data companies expect crypto infrastructure to become part of mainstream capital markets.
“Kaiko’s strength in crypto market data and analytics builds foundational transparency for the digital-asset ecosystem,” said Cathy Clay, chief executive of S&P Dow Jones Indices.
Joe Bonnaud, an executive at BNP Paribas, also highlighted the increasing need for trusted data, transparency and market infrastructure as tokenised finance develops.
Kaiko has expanded rapidly. The company recently bought DeFi infrastructure provider Cometh and rival data firm Amberdata. It has also launched digital-asset indices with S&P and is working with Bloomberg on onchain data for tokenised markets.
The latest funding points to a change in the institutional approach to tokenisation. Banks require more than custody services and trading venues: they also need benchmark-quality prices, compliance-ready data, risk analytics and infrastructure that can operate continuously.
That creates a potential link between blockchain networks and traditional finance. If tokenised securities continue to grow, demand could increase for regulated data providers, oracle infrastructure, settlement networks and blockchains able to support institutional activity.
The $110 million investment does not guarantee that tokenisation will scale. But the involvement of S&P Global, Nasdaq, BNP Paribas and Royal Bank of Canada indicates that Wall Street increasingly sees onchain markets as infrastructure it must prepare for, rather than a trend to observe from the sidelines.
Tokenised equities on Solana have reached an all-time high of roughly $684 million as real-world assets and stock trading continue to develop.
