JPMorgan, Apollo plan for enterprise mainnet, execs reveal

Executives of banking giants JPMorgan Chase and Apollo revealed plans for a tokenized ‘enterprise mainnet’ formed during a collaboration on the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) Project Guardian pilot project.

On Nov. 15, the MAS introduced five additional industry pilots to Project Guardian to test various use cases around asset tokenization, which saw participation from 17 member financial institutions, including JPMorgan and Apollo. The duo collaborated to test digital assets for more seamless investment and management of discretionary portfolios and alternative assets, automated portfolio rebalancing and customization at scale.

Members of the Project Guardian. Source: mas.gov.sg

In a Forbes interview, Christine Moy, partner at Apollo Global Management, explained how production-grade tokenization helped create intraday repo, JPMorgan’s new tradable product. The lender’s blockchain head, Tyrone Lobban, revealed that the new system has already processed over $900 billion in assets, adding:

“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.”

According to Moy, the system performs as an enterprise mainnet, and she sees it as having a first-mover advantage in the race for offering tokenized investment instruments. She said:

“Obviously, we’ve seen the progress and innovation of Ether (ETH) and how as the first mover, they had the network effects, and now that’s where all the next-generation innovation has been created.”

The ‘enterprise mainnet’ provides the scalability to add applications to a network with an existing Know Your Customer (KYC)-compliant set of institutional banks, broker-dealers and asset managers.

Related: Singapore central bank to trial live wholesale CBDC for settlements

Through Project Guardian, financial institutions are working out the ideal software stacks that could accommodate agnostic interoperability across different pools of assets.

On Nov. 24, MAS laid down measures for Digital Payment Token (DPT) service providers to discourage speculation in cryptocurrency investments.

Determining customers’ risk awareness, refusing credit card purchases, and providing no incentives are some of the ways MAS asked DPT service providers to help retail clients avoid price speculation.

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