Securities tokenization firm Prometheum raised $20 million this year to drive development of its public market infrastructure, the company announced Tuesday.
Prometheum, which currently offers digital asset custodial services to financial institutions and institutional investment firms, will use the money to launch trading services in the first quarter of 2025.
The funds, which came from an unnamed group of high-net worth individuals and institutions, will also allow Prometheum to support tokenized securities, or securities issued on the blockchain, by major institutions, founder and co-CEO Aaron Kaplan told Banking Dive.
Financial institutions in the near future will turn to the blockchain to issue securities because “it’s just a matter of efficiency,” Kaplan explained.
“It's for the same reason [trading] moved from paper to electronic to begin with. It's just a better Apple Card in the capacity that it’s a better means of record keeping,” he said. “It is more efficient from a resource perspective in that it takes less human involvement.”
The blockchain, he added, offers the possibility of instantaneous settlement, and the related cost savings “then allow issuers to create products that are arguably less expensive,” Kaplan said.
Prometheum has had an alternative trading system license, which allows for the trading of assets, from the Securities and Exchange Commission since 2021. The holdup in launching a trading platform, Kaplan explained, is that in order to offer trading in an SEC-approved manner, the firm had to be able to do “the post-trade side,” or settlement and custody.
That ability came with Prometheum’s receipt of a special purpose broker dealer license from the SEC in 2023. Unlike the ATS license, which simply allows assets to be traded, the SPBD license allows a holder to custody the assets.
Prometheum was the first – and is now just one of two – firms that have been awarded the license. It currently custodies digital assets including ethereum, or ETH; The Graph or GRT; Uniswap, or UNI; and Arbitrum, or ARB.
Regarding the $20 million capital raise, Kaplan said it will also allow Prometheum to continue hiring — something that many crypto and fintech firms were doing the opposite of in 2024.
“As we have launched custody and intend to launch trading, as well as work with major institutions to issue additional securities on chain, it's just a question of needing additional engineering resources, operational resources, and everything else that's required with launching different revenue streams,” Kaplan said.
Kaplan said the firm grew its employee base by 60% in 2024. Prometheum’s 62nd employee starts work for their first day on Thursday.
