The company announced Monday (Nov. 2) plans to combine with FG Imperii Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in a deal valuing tZERO at $350 million. Upon closing, the company is expected to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “TZRO.”
Alan Konevsky, tZERO’s CEO, said the SPAC deal strengthens the company’s ability to “scale market infrastructure required for an increasingly tokenized financial system” as it continues to offer its infrastructure-as-a-service capabilities to “Tier 1” institutional customers.
“With this step, we will continue to grow that infrastructure and deepen our diversified institutional and strategic relationships across asset classes,” he said. “My team and I are building markets for a tokenized world, and this transaction is intended to catalyze further growth, enhance competitiveness and enable tZERO to pursue that opportunity at greater scale and speed.”
Tony Scuderi, president of FG Imperii, noted that tZERO has spent years establishing capabilities needed at a time when tokenization is becoming a necessary component of institutional financial infrastructure.
“Its combination of regulatory permissions, technology and institutional connectivity provides a compelling foundation for growth as financial markets increasingly adopt digital rails,” he added.
Writing about this field last month, PYMNTS argued that tokenization has “a definition problem,” as tokenized assets, deposits and stablecoins might all use distributed ledgers, but are economically different instruments.
“A tokenized security digitizes ownership or economic rights associated with an asset. A tokenized deposit represents commercial-bank money and remains a liability of the issuing bank,” the report said. “A stablecoin typically represents a claim structured separately from a traditional commercial-bank deposit and is designed to circulate more broadly, often across public blockchain networks.”
J.P. Morgan offers “perhaps the clearest illustration” of how far production infrastructure can extend beyond experimentation, that report said. The bank’s Kinexys unit said in April that its blockchain-based infrastructure had processed upwards of $3 trillion since launching and was averaging more than $5 billion in transactions each day.
Meanwhile, Citi’s Citi Token Services uses tokenized deposits to allow institutional clients to move liquidity and make payments outside of conventional banking cutoffs, and has begun linking that infrastructure to other institutions.
“Tokenization, in a way, is already looking less like a product category and more like an alternative operating layer for custody, assets, liquidity and settlement,” the report added.
