- Siu allegedly borrowed money from Galaxy on June 4 for an undisclosed amount.
- Auction firm Tarisio claims to have traced the violin’s history back more than three centuries.
Yat Siu, co-founder of Animoca Brands and Michael Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital, has tokenized a 1708 Stradivarius violin in order to secure a loan in the multi-million dollar range.
Siu allegedly borrowed money from Galaxy on June 4 for an undisclosed amount, using his 316-year-old violin as security. In order to hang onto the violin and ensure that Siu pays down the loan, the digital assets firm converted it into a non-fungible token (NFT).
Banking on Tokenization
The exact amount of the loan was kept under wraps by Galaxy and Siu, but they did say it was “in the millions.” The violin will be held by a custodian in Hong Kong until Siu and Galaxy give their approval for its release.
Catherine the Great of Russia was a former owner of the violin. Auction firm Tarisio claims to have traced the violin’s history back more than three centuries, according to their meticulous documentation of the instrument’s pedigree.
The violin was purchased by Siu at auction in 2023 for more than $9 million. According to Thomas Cowan, VP of tokenization at Galaxy, the capacity to tokenize real assets has the potential to alter the landscape of crypto lending. Due to the unpredictable nature of digital assets, the collateral associated with them is typically rather large.
Tokenizing actual assets allows them to lend more to clients, even against volatile assets like Bitcoin or Ether, according to Cowan in a Bloomberg interview. Even though it’s a violin right now, the executive thinks it may grow to include real estate down the road.
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