KKR has reportedly never before digitised exposure to its alternative investment strategies in the US. The partners hope that this will make ‘institutional private market strategies more accessible to individual investors,’ as stated in Securitize’s press release.
Tokenisation involves the conversion of ownership rights of an asset into a digital token to be used on blockchains.
Launched in 2020, Avalanche is a blockchain platform which allows users to create their own decentralised applications (dApps). Its native token is AVAX. According to figures from Ava Labs, as reported by Decrypt, it can process around 4,500 transactions per second. According to figures from 21Shares, it saw a 10,731% exchange volume increase last year, and an increase in market capitalisation to the tune of USD 23.7 billion.
Recently, lending protocol Nereus Finance, which is based on Avalanche, suffered a flash loan attack (in which the culprit inflates an asset’s price, usually by borrowing uncollateralised funds). USD 370,000 was lost from a smart contract.
KKR is a major private equity firm which offers a range of services, from insurance solutions to alternative asset management.
In August, KKR reported net losses from the second quarter, with after-tax distributable earnings dropping by roughly 9% to about USD 840 million. Fee-related earnings sunk 2% to USD 461.2 million. Transaction fee income plummeted 61% to USD 84.6 billion.
The same month, KKR announced it was launching its third infrastructure investment in India, with the launch of the Highway Infrastructure Trust, aimed at investing in road infrastructure. KKR also concluded, in August 2022, the acquisition of security solutions company Barracuda from software investment company Thomas Bravo. At the end of that month, KKR led a Series B investment round into Digital Diagnostics, a healthcare technology company.
KKR was among the large private equity firms whose environmental policies came under fire in a recent ‘Private Equity Climate Risks’ report from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project and the Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund. KKR’s failure ‘to demonstrate meaningful progress on transitioning towards a clean energy portfolio’ and its engagement ‘in the extraction of resources and wealth from marginalized communities under the opacity that is inherent to private equity’ were criticised.
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