Harvard Business School has published a new case study about the evolution of Kinexys by J.P. Morgan, the firm’s industry-leading blockchain business unit and a part of J.P. Morgan Payments, underscoring how blockchain and digital assets innovation has moved from experimentation to live, scalable regulated financial infrastructure.

As the world’s largest bank by market capitalization, J.P. Morgan plays a central role in global payments. On an average day, J.P. Morgan Payments processes nearly $12 trillion in payments, equivalent to the world’s GDP every 10 days. An average of ~$7 billion is transacted on the Kinexys blockchain platform daily, with over $4 trillion in payments processed since inception.

The case study, “Kinexys by J.P. Morgan: Building Bank Money on Blockchain,” charts Kinexys’ journey to launching production-grade blockchain infrastructure while navigating the rapidly evolving digital money landscape.¹ Institutions are increasingly focused on 24/7 settlement, programmability and global reach, while regulatory and market developments have accelerated engagement with tokenized value. As traditional finance and decentralized finance converge, a new finance ecosystem organized around blockchain technology presents both risks and opportunities.

However, as Umar Farooq, the founder of Kinexys and Global Co-Head of J.P. Morgan Payments, remarks, “If blockchain is going to disrupt traditional finance, we should own the disruption, rather than be disrupted by others.”

For over a decade, Kinexys has pioneered blockchain innovation and disruption in the industry. First launched to explore distributed ledger technology and later formalized as a business unit, Kinexys has since achieved significant industry firsts and milestones. In the last 12 months alone, key highlights include:

• Kinexys launched JPM Coin, available for J.P. Morgan’s institutional clients’ use on Base.
• Kinexys’ infrastructure enabled J.P. Morgan Asset Management to launch its tokenized money market funds, MONY and JLTXX
• Kinexys by J.P. Morgan, BNY, RBC, DeepTempo, and NVIDIA completed a collaborative AI initiative demonstrating how federated learning enables institutions to enhance fraud detection while keeping sensitive data within their own secure environments.
• Kinexys expanded its Blockchain Deposit Account network with five new Asia-Pacific currencies, making it the most extensive currency offering for blockchain-based settlement and onchain FX in the world.
• Kinexys launched a GBP-denominated Blockchain Deposit Account in J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, N.A.’s London branch, marking one of the first blockchain products of its kind in the UK.
• Mitsubishi Corporation became the first Japanese corporate to adopt Kinexys’ Blockchain Deposit Account network or intragroup USD cash management across its major global financial centers in Singapore, London and New York.
• FirstRand Bank became the first financial institution to advance blockchain treasury management in South Africa with Kinexys’ Blockchain Deposit Account network.
• J.P. Morgan Private Bank, J.P. Morgan Asset Management and Citco commenced the first transaction of the Kinexys Fund Flow solution, which enables streamlined distribution and improved client-friendly features.

You can learn more about the Kinexys business and the colleagues behind it though our Pay It Forward podcast in episode 11, Kinexys: Leadership, Scale, and the Future of On-Chain Finance. For insight into the firm’s views on the promise of tokenization and the need to get the digital assets framework right in the United States, read Umar Farooq’s and Peter Muriungi’s latest ‘From the desks of’ blog.

For a primer on key terms and concepts in the blockchain and digital assets space, check out our Blockchain 101 glossary here.