Cross River Bank Builds Commercial Loan Tokenization Platform on Arbitrum One With Offchain Labs
Cross River Bank is working with Offchain Labs to tokenize commercial loans on Arbitrum One, using ZeroDev wallets, with production targeted for early 2027.
Cross River Bank (@crossriverbank) is moving part of its commercial lending business onto blockchain infrastructure. The New Jersey-based bank has built a loan tokenization and servicing platform on @Arbitrum One, the Ethereum layer-2 network, in partnership with Offchain Labs, the developer behind Arbitrum.
The platform is designed to turn commercial loans into programmable onchain credit instruments. It is aimed at institutions that trade in the credit secondary market, and is intended as a base for loan syndication and secondary debt transactions.
How the Platform Works
Cross River is building tokenization directly into its lending platform. Assets issued by the platform can be financed, held, and transferred on Arbitrum One from the moment of creation , according to Cross River's announcement as reported by ChaincCatcher.
The system uses Offchain Enterprise Services and embeds wallet infrastructure from @ZeroDev. Offchain Labs, the developer of Arbitrum, acquired ZeroDev, a New York-based provider of smart account infrastructure and developer tools . The embedded wallet is meant to hide gas fees and other blockchain complexity, which should make onboarding simpler for institutional users.
For borrowers, little changes. Applications, financing and repayments will still run through the existing customer interface, and Cross River remains a regulated bank and lender. Tokenization will not change loan underwriting, risk management or compliance standards.
Timeline and Context
The project is not yet in full production. Both parties have completed a proof of concept for loan tokenization and are working towards production deployment, with a target date of early 2027.
The move builds on Cross River's growing crypto activity. The bank launched a stablecoin payments offering in 2025 that unifies fiat and stablecoin flows through its real-time core, COS. It also agreed to buy crypto-backed loans from Figure Technology Solutions, and Figure describes itself as a blockchain-native capital marketplace for the origination, funding, sale, and trading of blockchain-native assets .
Commercial lending is a core business for the bank. Cross River is a New Jersey State chartered FDIC-insured bank known for its Commercial Banking Group and real estate lending platform . Putting that lending on blockchain rails would test whether tokenized credit can work inside a regulated banking framework, with $ARB-based infrastructure handling settlement and transfer.
Details on loan volumes, investor access and the structure of the tokens have not been disclosed in the sources reviewed.
Sources
ChainCatcher: Cross River promotes loan tokenization on Arbitrum One
