The next phase of blockchain adoption isn’t about more throughput or cheaper gas, it’s about making onchain systems usable for institutions without forcing them to give up custody, confidentiality, or compliance.
That context explains why Oasis has launched a strategic investment arm, and why its first investment targets a very specific problem: credit activation on tokenized assets that never leave custody.
The Problem Institutions Actually Care About
Tokenized real-world assets are growing fast, but credit markets around them are still thin. The blocker isn’t demand, it’s structure.
Most DeFi credit models assume:
- assets move freely between contracts,
- counterparties are visible,
- enforcement is public.
That works for crypto-native assets. It doesn’t work for custodians, asset managers, or regulated funds. Once assets leave custody, you’ve already lost the battle.
This is the gap SemiLiquid is addressing.
What SemiLiquid Does Differently
SemiLiquid’s approach starts from a hard constraint: collateral must remain inside existing custody frameworks.
Instead of wrapping assets or moving them into lending pools, SemiLiquid activates credit on top of tokenized collateral that stays put. Credit terms, margin logic, and liquidation conditions are enforced programmatically — without exposing positions or counterparty data.
From a systems perspective, this requires:
- confidential policy evaluation,
- automated enforcement logic,
- verifiable state transitions,
- and strict separation between what’s public and what must remain private.
This is not something generic smart contracts handle well.
Why Oasis Infrastructure Fits This Use Case
SemiLiquid is built on Oasis Sapphire, using confidential compute to enforce credit logic while keeping sensitive financial data encrypted.
A key component is Liquefaction, a research-backed primitive originating from Cornell Tech, which enables fine-grained control over information flow. Liquefaction allows credit systems to:
- enforce policy without revealing inputs,
- monitor breaches privately,
- issue programmable credit receipts,
- and still anchor outcomes onchain.
This combination of confidential execution & onchain verifiability is what makes custody-native credit feasible at all.
From Theory to Production
After an extended build phase, SemiLiquid is now running a live pilot with established players including:
Franklin Templeton,
Zodia Custody,
M11Credit,
Avalanche,
and Presto Labs.
The workflow covers collateral locking, credit issuance, monitoring, and repayment, all without exposing sensitive financial relationships or breaking custody guarantees.
That’s a meaningful signal that this isn’t just conceptual infrastructure.
What This Signals for Oasis
The launch of a strategic investment arm isn’t about picking winners randomly. It’s about backing teams that push confidential compute into real institutional workflows.
SemiLiquid sets the tone:
- compliance-aware by design,
- compute-heavy,
- confidentiality as a requirement, not an add-on.
Future investments are likely to follow the same pattern across RWAs, settlement layers, identity systems, and agent-based infrastructure where verifiable but private computation is unavoidable.
Closing Thought
If tokenized assets are going to support real credit markets, the infrastructure has to meet institutions where they are, not ask them to compromise on custody or confidentiality.
This investment is a bet that confidential compute is the missing layer, and that custody-native credit is one of the first places where it actually proves itself.
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Top comments (2)
Great insight this highlights how Oasis is moving beyond throughput hype to tackle real institutional pain points by backing custody-native credit infrastructure. By enabling credit on tokenized assets without leaving custody and preserving confidentiality through confidential compute (e.g., Sapphire + Liquefaction), it points to how Web3 can actually meet compliance and institutional requirements rather than forcing compromises.
This hits the real institutional bottleneck. Credit without breaking custody or exposing positions is exactly where most DeFi models fail. SemiLiquid feels like a strong example of why confidential compute on Oasis Sapphire isn’t just a privacy feature, but a prerequisite for making RWAs and institutional credit actually work on-chain.