Six years ago this month, Secured Finance began as a small hackathon project. Last week, we announced our role in bringing the Japanese Government Bond repo lifecycle on-chain — with Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking, @digitalasset and Progmat, on @CantonNetwork. Some personal context on why this matters. The joint announcement by four MUFG group companies is more than another PoC. To me, it is Japan — home to one of the world's largest collateral pools — signaling that it is serious about on-chain finance. Tokenization in Japan first took hold in primary markets: issuance and redemption. The next step is the secondary market: moving those assets, financing them, managing collateral and running the daily economics on-chain. That is where repo lives. Secured Finance is responsible for implementing the lifecycle: trade agreement and recording, opening-leg DvP, in-life valuation and collateral management, and closing-leg settlement. Because this is a global market, our protocol is designed to conform to established repo market standards and ultimately connect with international liquidity. Before founding Secured Finance, I structured and traded rates products at a global investment bank. Our team includes a trader with more than a decade of rates and FX experience at Goldman Sachs. Repo is the plumbing beneath the markets we worked in — and markets live in their daily motion: valuations, margin calls, collateral movements, unwinds and settlement, not only the instrument itself. We are pouring everything we learned into encoding JGB repo into a protocol, alongside the institutions responsible for the market infrastructure itself. What has struck me most in the industry-wide working group is the caliber of the people involved: sharp questions, fast responses, clear direction and a shared sense of purpose that crosses company lines. A market veteran with more than 30 years of experience told me he does not see this as a quick opportunity, but as the culmination of his professional life. I was deeply moved by that. Years ago, I left traditional finance, moved overseas and learned software engineering because I believed these two worlds would eventually reconnect. Those paths are now converging. For a startup to be entrusted with the lending protocol implementing this lifecycle is a rare opportunity and a serious responsibility. Through the PoC, we will validate the design and move it toward production-grade institutional market infrastructure. English release: