Liquida is the regulated collateral rail for the UK's £2.7 trillion gilt market, we frame this as a next generation repo market. What we do is tokenise existing gilt ISINs as tGILT - 1:1 backed by gilts held with a FCA-regulated custodian. This makes them usable as instant, 24/7 collateral for GBP through Morpho lending markets. Enabling UK institutions to better utilise and mobilise their safest collateral for liquidity.
The UK gilt market is the world's fourth-largest sovereign debt market - £2.7 trillion, the safest asset class in sterling with over 300 years of credibility - and it runs on infrastructure closed 77% of the week. CREST settles T+1, business hours only. Mid-market banks and building societies are priced out of tier-1 repo desks entirely, so institutions required by regulation to hold gilts cannot mobilise them: forced to own the asset, unable to use it. Tokenised US Treasuries have passed $10bn proving institutional demand for sovereign collateral on-chain - no sterling equivalent exists. And current efforts don't close the gap: digital repo platforms (HSBC Orion, J.P. Morgan Kinexys, Broadridge) are closed networks for the tier-1 club, and gilt tokenisation to date touches only new primary issuance, not the £2.7 trillion already outstanding.
We make UK gilts liquid - hence, Liquida. We take the gilts institutions already own, hold them with Archax, our FCA-regulated custodian partner, and issue a 1:1 security token per ISIN - tGILT - priced with S&P Global data delivered on-chain via Chainlink, with wallet infrastructure secured by Fireblocks. Nothing mints without a signed custody confirmation. tGILTs then plug into Morpho vaults - battle-tested lending infrastructure with over $10bn in active liquidity - enabling instant borrowing and lending of GBP against sovereign debt, 24/7, via atomic DvP settlement, while the collateral keeps accruing its full sovereign yield. A new generation of repo markets: everyone else in tokenised sovereigns sells yield; we sell liquidity.
Both sides of this market are structurally manufactured, not speculative. The borrow side exists today - treasury desks raise GBP against gilt inventory every day; we route an existing workflow onto better rails. The lend side is created by regulation: the Bank of England's stablecoin regime pushes sterling issuer reserves into short-dated gilts, making issuers natural anchor lenders - which is why our first pilot integrations are ReStabilise and Agant, GBP stablecoin issuers with exactly that mandate. tGILT itself, as a non-rebasing digital security rather than a stablecoin, sits outside that restrictive regime entirely - full yield to the holder, no holding caps. The regulation constraining the adjacent product manufactures our lender base.
We are building inside the regulatory perimeter, not around it. Liquida has submitted its Gate 1 application to the Bank of England and FCA Digital Securities Sandbox; decision expected mid-September. We are live on testnet with a smart contract audit planned for Q4, an NDA in place with Chainlink, commercial discussions ongoing with S&P Global, Fireblocks and Archax, and an NDA with NatWest on the cash leg. On the lending side, we are in due diligence with Gauntlet as vault curator. The founding team previously managed relationships with 50+ UK banks and building societies at a £20bn London asset manager - Shawbrook, Nationwide, Cambridge Building Society among them - a day-one distribution pipeline of exactly the desks this rail serves. Breakeven is roughly £90m in assets - about three clients - and we hold fifty of those relationships.
For the Arbitrum ecosystem, this is a new asset class arriving with its own distribution. This weekend Liquida made its first public deployment on Robinhood Chain testnet - sovereign-grade collateral, the benchmark HQLA of the world's sixth-largest economy, arriving on the chain's own Morpho markets and opening a sterling-denominated institutional corridor no other chain serves. The flow behind it is not retail speculation but bank treasury desks with structural daily demand.
We arrived Friday with a Foundry-tested contract suite that had never left local development: tGILT, a price-accruing ERC-20 security token; NavOracle, our hybrid pricing oracle; MorphoOracleAdapter, a stateless adapter into Morpho Blue; PermissionGate, on-chain KYB whitelisting enforced on every transfer and vault interaction; and VaultManager, the orchestration layer. Over the weekend we shipped: (1) our first public deployment - the full suite plus a self-deployed Morpho Blue instance, live on Robinhood Chain testnet, all contracts verified on the explorer; (2) the complete collateral lifecycle running end to end on-chain - tGILT minted under dual approval through the multisig, posted as collateral to an isolated Morpho market, GBP borrowed, interest accrued per block, repaid, collateral released, tokens burned; (3) live on-chain pricing through the NavOracle, with deterministic per-block interest accrual between pushed updates - indicative public gilt reference data for the demonstration, with production sourcing (S&P Global); (4) the negative path proven on-chain - a non-whitelisted wallet attempting to receive tGILT is reverted by PermissionGate at the bytecode level; and (5) the demo interface a treasury desk would actually use, covering the admin custody view and the desk borrowing view. Partner-operated components are simulated at the boundary and explicitly labelled throughout - custody confirmation (production: Archax, FCA-regulated, CREST), key management (production: Fireblocks MPC/HSM), cash leg (production: FCA-cohort GBP stablecoins). Everything we built is live; everything our partners operate is mocked at the named boundary. Both the Product and GTM canvases were completed during the event.
We have bootstrapped Liquida to this point. Over a year of building without institutional capital, we assembled the full infrastructure stack - FCA-regulated custody (Archax), digital custody (Fireblocks), evaluated pricing (S&P Global, with Chainlink delivery under MNDA), and lending infrastructure (Morpho) - alongside preparing and submitting a Bank of England Digital Securities Sandbox application. That sequencing was deliberate: regulatory position and partnership stack first, capital second, so the round funds execution rather than exploration. We are now completing our pre-seed this quarter. A lead term sheet is signed, several funds are in active diligence on the remaining allocation, and the raise carries the company through production deployment and audits, and first institutional pilots.
