Some of the biggest banking titans of America are looking at using crypto technology to build new rails that could be part of a future $5 trillion industry.
Giants like JPMorgan and Citi are looking to “supercharge” Wall Street by working towards tokenizing assets on blockchains, CNBC reports.
Ryan Rugg, Citibank’s head of digital assets, says that having a system that is “always on” like a blockchain, is a big priority for the bank’s clients moving forward.
“The digital-first economy that we’re moving towards is really important. As our clients embark on this digital journey, being able to move money 24/7/365 in a programmable fashion that’s always on is what we really want to enable our clients.”
As it currently stands, banks on Wall Street use the “T+2,” or “trade plus two days” system, which takes two days for transactions to settle and involves several middlemen. The banks believe that putting their activity on the chain would create efficient and near-instant transactions.
Citi analysts reportedly believe that $5 trillion worth of real world assets could be tokenized on blockchains by 2030.
JPMorgan launched its blockchain business unit in 2020, called Onyx, which has already been used by some banks to settle dollar trades, and has handled $700 billion in short term loans, according to CNBC. Onyx CEO Umar Farooq says that the company stands firm in its belief that the underlying technology of blockchain will ultimately “rewrite” financial systems.
“We’ve always believed that this technology has the ability to really revolutionize and rewrite financial infrastructure, whether that infrastructure is to move money, securities, any kind of asset. So despite all the ups and downs of prices of crypto and all that, we’ve been pretty consistent that the technology itself has a lot of power to rethink financial infrastructure.”
During a new interview with Fox Business, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said that Bitcoin, along with the tokenization of assets, could be part of a massive revolution of finance.
“We’re a believer in the digitization of products. ETFs was a big revolution for the mutual fund industry and it’s really taking over the mutual fund industry. And we do believe that if we can create a great more tokenization of assets and securities, and that’s what Bitcoin is, it could revolutionize finance.
And so we look at this as an opportunity to move one step further in terms of providing investors fractions of shares, fractions of this, democratizing the cost of investing.
Over the last 10 years we’ve lowered the cost of [BlackRock] iShares ETFs by 30%. So what we’re trying to do is make it more accessible or easy.
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