Milan, 15 April 2026 — UniCredit and BlockInvest announce the completion of a strategic €4 million investment that sees the pan-European banking group acquire a ca.16% stake in the tech company.
The operation marks a fundamental milestone in the evolution of market infrastructures toward the adoption of blockchain technology as a ledger for the native issuance of digital financial instruments on a European scale.
In a landscape where the tokenization of Real-World Assets (RWA) is redefining paradigms of efficiency and transparency, the investment aims to consolidate a technological infrastructure capable of merging the programmability of digital ledgers with the regulatory rigor of financial markets.
The global on-chain finance market represents an opportunity estimated at approximately €18 trillion by 20331. Europe is laying the groundwork to become the global benchmark for tokenization, thanks to a harmonized regulatory framework (DLT Pilot Regime, MiCAR) and infrastructure projects led by the ECB (Pontes, Appia).
The partnership between UniCredit and BlockInvest rests on solid foundations, built through successful transactions that have already defined Italy's operational standards in compliance with Italy's FinTech Law. Specifically, the collaboration enabled the execution of the first natively digital minibond and, more recently, the first tokenized structured note on a public blockchain for the Wealth segment. These operations demonstrated the BlockInvest infrastructure's ability to manage complex instruments, drastically reducing settlement times and ensuring granular traceability unachievable with traditional clearing systems.
With this investment, UniCredit accelerates the consolidation of its digital assets capabilities, with the ambition of exporting tokenized financial solutions across the Group's main markets. The BlockInvest infrastructure aims to become the reference standard for digital assets interoperability at European level, facilitating access to the web3 ecosystem for issuers and other financial institutions, offering sophisticated and secure solutions.
Lorenzo Rigatti, CEO and Co-founder of BlockInvest, stated:
"UniCredit investment is the recognition of a rigorous and ambitious growth path. We are facing a paradigm shift where technological innovation is no longer an ancillary element, but the very backbone of the market. This strategic partnership allows us to integrate our solutions into the workflows of one of the leading European banks, transforming our vision into a consolidated market standard ready to scale... one block at a time."
1 The Impact of DLT in Capital Markets: Ready for Adoption, Time to Act (2025)
Contacts:
Media Relations
Email: mediarelations@unicredit.eu