Tokenized assets can bring trillions of dollars to DeFi: JPMorgan, Onyx

JPMorgan Chase & Co. blockchain business unit Onyx aims to bring trillions of dollars in tokenized assets to decentralized finance (DeFi), Onyx head of digital assets Tyrone Lobban said at CoinDesk’s Consensus 2022 conference. 

Fast facts

• “Over time, we think tokenizing U.S. Treasurys or money market fund shares, for example, means these could all potentially be used as collateral in DeFi pools,” Lobban said. “The overall goal is to bring these trillions of dollars of assets into DeFi, so that we can use these new mechanisms for trading, borrowing [and] lending, but with the scale of institutional assets.”

• In May, the Onyx Digital Assets blockchain began supporting trades of tokenized versions of BlackRock’s money market fund shares.
• Onyx’s blockchain has a trading volume of over US$350 million in tokenized loans, according to Lobban. 

• JPMorgan is taking part in Project Guardian with the Monetary Authority of Singapore, DBS Bank, and Marketnode to explore use cases of digital assets tokenization and institutional DeFi.
• Although JPMorgan Chairman Jamie Dimon has been a Bitcoin critic, the bank has been an early adopter of blockchain, developing its network Quorum in 2016, which was acquired by Ethereum software firm ConsenSys in 2020.