In June we reported that Umar Farooq, the CEO of Onyx by JP Morgan, was promoted to co-lead Payments. That followed the departure of Takis Georgakopoulos. Now the Onyx blockchain arm will be co-led by the two most senior executives in the division, Naveen Mallela who already heads Onyx Coin Systems and Tyrone Lobban, the leader of Blockchain Launch and Onyx Digital Assets.
For such a large bank, JP Morgan has been a major innovator in the blockchain space. Years before zero knowledge proofs (ZKP) were available on the public Ethereum blockchain, the bank concluded it needed a permissioned version and adopted ZKP for privacy, with help from ZCash. Work on Ethereum-based Quorum started in 2016 and it became one of the top three enterprise blockchains.
By 2020 it concluded that managing permissioned blockchain technology wasn’t really the role of a bank and it transferred it to Consensys. Around the same time, it formed the Onyx unit.
Onyx by JP Morgan
Roll forward to today and the JPM Coin blockchain-based bank account processes billions of dollars of transactions daily. Onyx has a portfolio of solutions, including intraday repo, DLT collateral management, Liink for payment tracking, bond issuance and more.
JP Morgan had the foresight to realise early on that Singapore was leaning into the technology more than U.S. regulators. It took part in Singapore’s Project Ubin for CBDC. That evolved into the formation of Partior for cross border payments, alongside DBS Bank, Temasek and Standard Chartered.
Today it continues to engage with Singapore’s wide ranging DLT activities, including public blockchain experimentation through Project Guardian and participating in the Global Layer One (GL1), a new institutional network that aims to be closer to the openness of public blockchains.
That emphasis on openness has rubbed off on the Onyx team. JPM Coin is now getting integrated via API with other solutions such as Broadridge’s intraday repo DLR. Plus, it is opening up its digital assets platform to third party applications.
So far the Onyx team has got an awful lot right. The fact that the two leaders were there from the early days means it’s in good hands.
