GSR, the crypto market-making firm founded in 2013, has committed $100 million to launch Hare, an onchain vault business built around credit products.

The capital is the anchor for the new venture, which extends a research note GSR published on October 7, 2026, outlining its plan to build an "Onchain Credit Desk." Hare formalizes that thesis: credit is now a dedicated line of business, not a side experiment.

What is Hare building?

Hare will operate onchain vaults with credit as its core product. The $100 million commitment funds the launch and gives the new unit runway to structure its first offerings.

The business sits inside GSR's broader capital-markets platform, which the firm has been expanding through acquisitions and regulatory registrations over the past 18 months.

How did GSR get here?

GSR was established in 2013 and built its reputation on market making and over-the-counter trading — supplying liquidity and handling large block trades away from public exchanges. The firm is now layering credit and tokenization on top of that core franchise.

Recent corporate moves include:

• March 2026: Acquired Autonomous and Architech for a combined $57 million to strengthen the capital-markets platform.
• September 2026: Secured registrations in the Cayman Islands and acquired a FINRA-registered broker-dealer to support US operations.
• Tokenization: Led investment rounds in real-world-asset infrastructure, including Libeara, which supports more than $1 billion in onchain asset origination.

The regulatory footprint matters for a credit product. Cayman registration and a US broker-dealer license give GSR a path to onboard institutional depositors that purely decentralized protocols cannot reach.

What does this mean for onchain credit?

The onchain credit market has so far been dominated by DeFi-native lenders — protocols that rely on overcollateralization and permissionless deposits. GSR enters with a different profile: deep liquidity relationships built over a decade and a growing set of regulated entities.

That combination lets the firm structure products that sit between traditional credit and onchain settlement, a gap that several tokenization projects have tried to fill without an established market maker behind them. The Libeara relationship, in particular, gives GSR a pipeline of onchain-originated assets that can be plugged into the credit book as collateral or as reference exposures.

What should observers watch?

Three operational questions will determine whether Hare scales:

• Product structure: What instruments does the first vault offer, and on which chain or token standard?
• Eligibility: Who is permitted to deposit — accredited investors only, or broader institutional and qualified purchasers?
• Routing: Does vault activity flow through GSR's regulated entities, and how does the Libeara relationship feed the credit book?

The answers will shape how the $100 million is deployed and whether the unit functions as a credit desk or a tokenized yield product. They will also signal whether onchain credit is converging with traditional prime brokerage or fragmenting further along native-DeFi lines.

GSR has not yet announced a launch date for Hare's first vault. The October research note and the September regulatory buildout point to a near-term institutional debut that closes the gap between OTC liquidity provision and onchain credit.