Laser Digital, the digital assets subsidiary of Japanese financial holding firm Nomura, has launched a fund providing a new avenue for institutional investors to gain exposure to Bitcoin (BTC).

The Bitcoin Adoption Fund will provide long-only exposure to Bitcoin and will be the first in a range of digital adoption investment solutions offered by Laser Digital, the firm said in a Sept. 19 announcement.

“Bitcoin is one of the enablers of this long-lasting transformational change, and long-term exposure to Bitcoin offers a solution to investors to capture this macro trend,” Sebastien Guglietta, head of Laser Digital Asset Management, said in a statement.

Laser Digital has also tapped sister firm Komainu as its regulated custody solutions provider. According to the announcement, the new Bitcoin fund would be a portion of Laser Digital Funds Segregated Portfolio Company that has been registered as a mutual fund with the Cayman Islands Regulatory Authority.

Nomura, which manages more than $500 billion worth of assets and offers brokerage services to leading institutional investors, has been aggressively expanding its footprint in the digital asset space for quite some time. In 2020, the Japanese financial services giant launched Komainu in partnership with crypto wallet provider Ledger and digital assets manager CoinShares.

In September 2022, the firm launched Laser Digital, a venture capital arm aimed at investing in companies focusing on cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. The crypto arm’s Dubai subsidiary, Laser Digital Middle East FZE, secured a license from the jurisdiction’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority to offer broker-dealer and virtual asset management and investment services in 2023.

Nomura’s new Bitcoin Adoption Fund comes amid ongoing discussions around Bitcoin-based investment products from regulated, legacy financial institutions. In spite of the delayed decision on spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has given the green light to two futures ETFs based on Bitcoin. In addition, Canada and Europe have also approved a number of investment products that focus on Bitcoin over the past few years.