By
Temitope Olatunji
April 26th, 2024
JPMorgan’s managing director Tyrone Lobban noted that the new system has processed over $900 billion in assets since launch.
Top executives from US-based financial services companies JPMorgan Chase and Apollo Global Management have revealed their plans for the tokenized enterprise mainnet, developed in collaboration with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).
The duo worked together on the MAS crypto pilot project, Project Guardian, designed to explore the tokenization of assets using public blockchains.
Enterprise Mainnet: A First-Mover Advantage
After collaborating with MAS to test their new blockchain project, Christine Moy, a partner at Apollo, and JPMorgan’s managing director Tyrone Lobban, sat down for an interview with Forbes on November 27 to discuss tokenization and its potential applications across the financial industry.
When asked how digital assets fit within Apollo’s broader mandate, Moy explained how production-grade tokenization led to the creation of JPMorgan’s innovative tradable product, the intraday repo.
According to Moy, the system serves as an enterprise mainnet, referring to the intraday repo. The Apollo partner said the product has a first-mover advantage in offering tokenized investment instruments. Drawing parallels to the success of Ethereum (Ether), she stated:
“Obviously, we’ve seen the progress and innovation of Ether, and now that’s where all the next-generation innovation has been created.”
She further highlighted that the enterprise mainnet provides scalability, enabling software developers the opportunity to deploy applications to a network already compliant with Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements for institutional banks, broker-dealers, and asset managers.
Lobban also chimed in, noting that the new system has processed over $900 billion in assets since launch. He said:
“There was actually no intraday repo market before this, and now we’re settling around $2 billion a day of intraday repo trades through our platform.”
He also emphasized the broader impact of blockchain technology, stating that the public ledger is an exciting technology.
“Blockchain is a very interesting technology for efficiency purposes and creating optimized settlements, but really, the thing that people don’t necessarily talk about is the ability to create new products, things that didn’t exist before,” he continued.
MAS Unveils Measures for DPT Service Providers
MAS expanded its Project Guardian by introducing five additional industry pilots on November 15 to explore diverse use cases around asset tokenization. The financial regulator introduced five new initiatives under the project, such as the Global Layer One (GL1), where heavyweights like JPMorgan, Apollo, DBS, BNY Mellon, and MUFG explored opportunities designed to simplify cross-border transactions and create global liquidity pools.
During the pilot, JPMorgan and Apollo partnered to focus on testing digital assets to enhance the seamless management of discretionary portfolios and alternative assets and automate portfolio rebalancing at scale, leading to the creation of the intraday repo.
Other financial institutions involved in Project Guardian, such as Citi, Fidelity, and T Rowe Price, joined forces to explore the use of foreign exchange (FX) and oracles on the Avalanche blockchain.
Some of the 17 financial institutions that participated in the pilot are actively working on defining software stacks that enable agnostic interoperability across different asset pools, showcasing ongoing collaboration and commitment to transformative innovation.
Last week, the MAS introduced measures for Digital Payment tokens (DPT) service providers to discourage speculation in crypto investments. These measures include assessing customers’ risk awareness, refusing credit card purchases, and providing no incentives to retail clients to deter price speculation.