When a bank sells a loan, the borrower might barely notice. Behind the scenes, the lender, the buyer and the company collecting payments all need to agree on who owns the loan and how much is still owed. Cross River wants them to be able to follow the same record from the day the loan is made.
On November 3, Cross River founder and CEO Gilles Gade announced at Hong Kong FinTech Week that the bank is working with Offchain, the developer of Arbitrum, to build that record into its lending platform. The partners have completed a proof of concept and are targeting early 2027 to put it into production. Cross River’s announcement
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What changes when a loan starts onchain?
Take someone borrowing through a fintech app that uses Cross River. Under the proposed system, that person would apply, receive the money and make payments through the same app. Cross River would still decide whether to approve the loan and remain the lender of record.
The difference would show up when an investor buys the loan. A digital token on Arbitrum One would represent the loan from the start. If a credit fund bought it, the transfer and subsequent payments could be recorded in the same place. Today, lenders often create the loan in one system and move its records into another when they sell it.
That could change how funds put money to work. A fund could agree in advance to buy a portion of the qualifying loans Cross River originates. As each loan is made, the fund could take ownership under that agreement instead of waiting for a batch of loans to be assembled and sold.
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The bank already knows how to find buyers for loans
Cross River’s commercial banking group facilitated nearly $1.5 billion in loans in 2025 and added more than 25 institutional investors and program partners, according to Gade’s year-end letter. Those figures describe the bank’s existing business. Cross River has yet to say how much lending it expects to move onto Arbitrum.
“Starting there means one record, fewer steps, from funding through every change of hands.”
— Gilles Gade, Founder and CEO, Cross River
The bank has also sat on the buyer’s side of a deal like this. In June, its Principal Finance Group committed to purchasing up to $250 million in assets to support Figure’s crypto-backed loans. In that deal, borrowers pledge crypto to get dollars. Here, the loan itself is the asset Cross River wants to put onchain.
Last month, Blockster covered Cross River’s integration of Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin for payments. The Arbitrum project takes on a different job inside the bank. Its first commercial test will come when a fund puts up money for a newly issued loan and can follow both the ownership and the repayments on the same record.
Reporting by Lidia Yadlos
