J.P. Morgan's blockchain unit, Onyx Coin Systems, has achieved another milestone in the Middle East by successfully completing a pilot project for blockchain-based cross-border payments with First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB). The pilot phase was executed smoothly, and the response times were deemed satisfactory, according to a statement.
This accomplishment with FAB comes shortly after similar testing was conducted in Bahrain, where ABC Bank had been testing the Onyx system and initiating a limited rollout of services. First Abu Dhabi Bank expressed its intent to further explore the opportunities offered by the system.
Launched in 2020, J.P. Morgan's permissioned distributed ledger system, Onyx, has been gaining momentum in recent months. Tyrone Lobban, the Head of Digital Assets and Blockchain at JPMorgan Onyx, revealed earlier in the month that the platform is currently handling between $1 billion to $2 billion in transactions daily. In addition to its expansion in the Middle East, Onyx has been facilitating euro-denominated payments in Europe since June. In the same month, it also introduced interbank dollar settlement in India through a consortium involving six banks.
On October 11, the first public trade was settled on J.P. Morgan's new tokenized staking network, which operates on the Onyx blockchain. Money market fund shares are tokenized and used as collateral with Barclays for derivatives exchanges between J.P. Morgan and BlackRock. In June, Mastercard announced its testing of a multi-token network, and in September, Citigroup launched Citi Token Services.
Project Guardian, which included participation from J.P. Morgan, DBS Bank, and Marketnode, concluded in June. It was a collaborative effort between the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Bank for International Settlements and involved the creation of a liquidity pool comprising tokenized bonds and deposits for lending and borrowing.
