JPMorgan Continues to Push for Tokenization of Traditional Financial Assets

JPMorgan, one of Wall Street's largest investment banks, is continuing its efforts to tokenize traditional financial assets, despite last year's market downturn.

Tyrone Lobban, the head of JPMorgan's digital asset and tokenization platform Onyx, revealed that the bank has already processed nearly $700 billion in short-term loans on the platform, with more to come in the near future.

"We think that tokenization is a killer app for traditional finance," Lobban said in a recent CoinDesk interview. He highlighted the disparity between private markets, such as private credit, equity, and real estate, which are much less liquid than public markets, despite being double the size.

"While the Onyx team has felt the impact of the crypto market downturn and regulatory crackdowns, our strategy hasn't changed at all," Lobban said. "In any case, there's so much work to do that these kinds of momentary lows are really very minor over the long term."

Onyx is a permissioned version of the Ethereum blockchain that JPMorgan created for use between different banking partners. The platform has been used mainly for making transactions in the repo market, where institutions borrow assets for short-term financing needs.

Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, and DBS Bank are among the banks that have joined JPMorgan on the platform, with others considering signing up.

JPMorgan's tokenization plans were first revealed in May last year. Despite some in the crypto community viewing banks' enterprise blockchain projects as a bear market signal, JPMorgan has continued to make progress in this area. Additionally, the bank launched its own centralized digital token, JPM Coin, in 2019.

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