Distributed ledger technology, or blockchain, received some good news regarding its utility in establishment finance. Speaking at the annual Singapore Fintech Festival, Umar Farooq, JP Morgan’s (NYSE:JPM) Global Head of Financial Institution Payments, said that JPM Coin is now doing approximately $1 billion daily in transactions and is on track to grow further, according to Bloomberg.
JPM Coin is part of JP Morgans Onyx Coin Systems, which is working on cross-border payments. The thesis is that current payments systems are slow and costly and it is time for an improvement. The solution is “programmable, real-time, multi-currency payments using multi-bank shared ledgers.” While some may view JPM Coin as crypto, it is really an attempt to upgrade existing payments rails. As JPM currently moves around $10 trillion daily, the opportunity is huge and JPM Coin is still very small.
Around the same time, JPM provided a boost for an enterprise-capable blockchain Avalanche as it revealed a pilot with Onyx on tokenization – taking assets and turning them into digital assets. A week ago, Avalanche (AVAX was trading around USD $14. Today, AVAX is around $21 after hitting $24.
The proof of concept aims to demonstrate how blockchain technology can potentially help automate portfolio management. This includes portfolios with alternative investments, assets that have historically been more difficult to manage – think private equity, real estate, private credit etc.
The pilot is described as “an ambitious effort to take the first steps towards enabling personalized investment portfolios at scale, with vastly simplified and streamlined order execution and settlement processes.”
