Zamanat said it is launching a tokenized private credit fund for small and medium-sized enterprises in the Gulf Cooperation Council, with a maximum size of $100 million, structured in the Dubai International Financial Centre and issued on-chain as investment tokens.

The planned vehicle is called Zamanat Fund CEIC Limited. Zamanat said it will be set up as a closed-end exempt fund under the DIFC framework, with fund shares issued as ZM1 Investment Tokens. Investors must meet professional client standards set by the Dubai Financial Services Authority.

According to the company, the fund will operate on ZIGChain. Zamanat said tokenization is being used to record ownership of fund shares and support settlement on the blockchain, rather than to change the underlying nature of the fund itself. The stated focus is private credit for GCC SMEs.

Zamanat linked the product to a financing shortfall in the region, saying the GCC SME funding gap reaches $250 billion and that only about 11% is accessible through credit. The company also described the launch as the first real deployment of a digital Sharia asset strategy combining Islamic finance and digital assets.

Still, several material details remain undisclosed. Zamanat has not said how much capital has been committed, how many investors have joined, whether the tokens have already been issued, or whether any loans have been originated through the fund. Based on the current disclosure, the confirmed stage is the planned formation of the fund and its tokenization structure.

Why It Matters

The announcement brings together several areas that crypto and traditional finance are both watching closely: tokenized real-world assets, private credit, Gulf financial infrastructure, and Sharia-compliant product design. If implemented, it would add another example of blockchain being used not for public token trading but for ownership records and settlement in a regulated investment structure.

It also points to how tokenization efforts in the region may develop through institutional and restricted-access products rather than retail-first models. That makes execution, regulatory fit, and actual credit deployment more important than the headline fund size alone.