JP Morgan's Onyx Blockchain Used for Siemens' Digital Commercial Paper Settlement

German industrial giant Siemens AG tapped global bank JPMorgan's blockchain-based payment system Onyx and SWIAT's private blockchain to issue and settle a tokenized version of its commercial paper, the companies said on Monday.

Siemens issued €100,000 worth of crypto securities under the German Electronic Securities Act (eWpG) on September 13, then redeemed it three days later. The payments were conducted on the Onyx network using the JPM Coin System, while asset transfers were settled on the SWIAT network's delivery-versus-payment (DvP) mechanism.

The whole process took 93 seconds from the confirmation of the trade by the parties on SWIAT to final confirmation of settlement sent to the parties that asset and payment transfers were completed. DekaBank also participated, acting as a regulated crypto securities registrar on the SWIAT network.

The transaction marked the start of Onyx and SWIAT collaborating to develop asset issuance products on blockchain rails for commercial banks. Their goal is to shorten value chains, increase transaction flexibility and speeds, and ultimately make financial transactions via blockchain rails scalable for commercial banks, the companies said.

Tokenization of traditional financial instruments, or real-world assets (RWA), has been a fast-growing area for blockchain technology with big banks getting increasingly involved. JPMorgan has been one of the early leaders in the space with Onyx and its JPM Coin blockchain-based settlement tech.

Transactions with JPM Coin have "exploded" after introducing programmability to the network, with transactions reaching multiple billions of U.S. dollars on some days, Umar Farooq, former head of Onyx by JP Morgan, currently co-head of Payments, said in May during a panel discussion at Consensus 2024.

"We're probably one of the bigger users of blockchain," said JPMorgan CEO Jaime Dimon at a recent event at Georgetown University, though he argued that the technology is just a database. Dimon has been an outspoken critic of cryptocurrencies, calling them "pet rock" on multiple occasions.

Jesse Hamilton contributed reporting to the story.