Nomura Weighs a Laser Digital Sale as Europe Posts a Fourth Loss
Nomura Holdings is weighing a sale of Laser Digital, the Zurich crypto unit it built from nothing in 2022, and has held talks with buyers including the London financial services firm Marex Group. Bloomberg reported the talks on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter, and both accounts read here on Thursday rest on that one report. No decision has been made. Nomura could sell to another party or keep the business. Marex is assessing a deal.
Which quarter the losses belong to
CoinDesk, publishing on Thursday morning, reported that Nomura's European operations posted a pre-tax loss of 7.4 billion yen, about $46.3 million, in the quarter ended 30 September, the fourth consecutive quarterly loss for the region. The regional figures do not break out what Laser Digital contributed. The Crypto Times, reading the same Bloomberg story some hours earlier, dated the decisive losses to the October-to-December 2025 quarter and wrote that they pushed the whole European business into the red last year. Both descriptions can be true of different periods. Neither account reconciles with the other, and this desk could not establish which window the original sources meant.
A unit that kept collecting licenses
Laser Digital has gone on expanding through the loss-making stretch. Its Japanese subsidiary registered as a crypto asset exchange service provider in August, the first new entrant in that market since 2022 on The Crypto Times' account, and in May US regulators granted preliminary conditional approval for a proposed national trust bank. That charter is not usable yet. The bank cannot open until it meets pre-opening requirements, and the approval can still be modified or withdrawn before it does.
The Gulf came earlier. Abu Dhabi Global Market gave the unit in-principle approval in September 2023, and it also holds a Dubai crypto business license, a build-out that runs alongside the full VARA broker-dealer licenses trading firms have been taking in the emirate. Switzerland has not been easy ground this year. Bitcoin Suisse cut up to half its Swiss staff and closed its Copenhagen office in September.
What a buyer would be taking on
Marex trades on Nasdaq and has been assembling a crypto business of its own: clearing, settlement and execution, market making, structured products, treasury management and financing, with a broker slot on the derivatives venue Deribit since June. Laser Digital would add registrations in Japan and the United Arab Emirates, plus a pending US trust charter. Any change of control would go back to the regulators that issued them. The licenses are the asset. The trading book is the thing Nomura has spent the year trying to shrink.
Nothing is signed
Chief Financial Officer Hiroyuki Moriuchi said in January that the firm would cut trading risk at the unit while expanding asset management and custody, the business of holding crypto for clients. A sale would take that volatility out of group results altogether. It would also hand four years of regulatory groundwork to someone else — the trade these talks are about. The two outlets do not even agree on what the parties said when asked. CoinDesk reported that neither Nomura nor Marex immediately responded to its request for comment, while The Crypto Times wrote that representatives for both declined to comment on the Bloomberg report. Two requests, two outcomes. Nobody has given a timeline.
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