JP Morgan’s Onyx Taps Avalanche for Tokenized Funds, AVAX Jumps 14%

By Decrypt Staff

Onyx by J.P. Morgan and Apollo Global unveiled a proof-of-concept with Avalanche under the Monetary Authority of Singapore's Project Guardian. The companies said in a press release it could transform asset and wealth management.

The proof-of-concept illustrates the potential of blockchain, smart contracts, and tokenization to streamline portfolio management, particularly for alternative assets that have been challenging to trade and manage.

That's been bullish news for AVAX, the native token of the Avalanche ecosystem. After the announcement, AVAX rose to $20.31—14% price increase in the last 24 hours and a 60% price increase compared to last week, according to CoinGecko.

The LayerZero protocol, which this year hit a valuation of $3 billion after its Series B raise, is being used to connect Onyx Digital Assets with an Avalanche Evergreen subnet.

In super simple terms, an Avalanche Evergreen subnet is an individual blockchain that's been specifically designed to suit the needs of institutions. That means extra consideration has been given to network privacy, gas features, and permissioning.

All of that infrastructure has made it possible for Onyx Digital Asset portfolios to access tokenized funds offered by WisdomTree. The $94 billion New York-based asset manager is also one of the firms in the running to launch a spot Bitcoin ETF.

"This initiative under Project Guardian fundamentally aligns with Ava Labs’ mission to provide the tools and tech to digitize and tokenize the world’s assets while harnessing the speed, scalability, and customizability of Avalanche," Ava Labs President John Wu said in a statement.

Project Guardian was launched in May 2022 to help the Singapore regulator discover use cases for asset tokenization. In November last year, the MAS conducted its first test. J.P. Morgan, DBS Bank and SBI Digital Asset Holdings used the Aave protocol on Polygon—a layer-2 scaling solution—to complete foreign exchange and government bond transactions on the Ethereum network.

Now Avalanche is helping bring big institutions, like J.P. Morgan, into the mix.

"Our work under Project Guardian demonstrates a significant opportunity for the asset and wealth management industry," said Tyrone Lobban, Head of Onyx Digital Assets. "By leveraging the power of blockchain technology we have shown how the construction and management of discretionary portfolios could be revolutionized."

Editor’s note: This article was written with the assistance of AI. Edited and fact-checked by Stacy Elliott.

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