JPMorgan Onyx, the bank’s blockchain platform for tokenizing traditional financial assets, is undaunted by the market and regulatory challenges facing cryptocurrencies.
The platform has processed nearly $700 billion of transactions using tokens backed by U.S. Treasuries and JPM Coin.
JPMorgan Onyx is a blockchain platform for tokenizing and trading assets with trusted parties.
The platform uses a permissioned version of Ethereum and a digitized version of the U.S. dollar, known as JPM Coin, and trades short-term loans with tokens and blockchain accounts for U.S. Treasuries.
Among the clients using the Onyx-based repo service are Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, and DBS Bank.
Others have recently gone live, and there’s a pipeline of about 15 banks and broker-dealers looking to sign up, Tyrone Lobban, head of Onyx Digital Assets, told CoinDesk in an interview.
As the platform ramps up, the focus would next move to tokenizing assets that are traditionally hard to finance, like money market funds, and using them for collateral purposes, said Lobban.
In the future, Lobban anticipates issuing more diverse assets on the blockchain, such as private fund tokens.
“We think that tokenization is a killer app for traditional finance,” Lobban told CoinDesk. “If you think about private markets – private credit, private equity, and private real estate – they are pretty much double the size of public markets, but many orders of magnitude less liquid, so there’s this huge disparity.
After last year’s crypto price boom, the Onyx crew has felt the chill of the bear market and governmental scrutiny.
Lobban said that post-FTX, they are more cautious, but JPMorgan’s strategy remains the same.
“We are still very much focused on our roadmap,”. “We are still very much focused on our client’s needs and delivering solutions that meet those needs.”
Tyrone Lobban 