According to CoinDesk, German industrial giant Siemens AG has utilized 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 announced on Monday that Siemens issued €100,000 worth of crypto securities under the German Electronic Securities Act (eWpG) on September 13 and 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 entire process took 93 seconds from the confirmation of the trade by the parties on SWIAT to the final confirmation of settlement, indicating that asset and payment transfers were completed. DekaBank also participated in the transaction, acting as a regulated crypto securities registrar on the SWIAT network. This transaction marks the beginning of a collaboration between Onyx and SWIAT 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.
Tokenization of traditional financial instruments, or real-world assets (RWA), has been a rapidly growing area for blockchain technology, with significant involvement from major banks. JPMorgan has been a leader in this space with Onyx and its JPM Coin blockchain-based settlement technology. Transactions with JPM Coin have surged after introducing programmability to the network, reaching multiple billions of U.S. dollars on some days, according to Umar Farooq, head of Onyx by JP Morgan, during a panel discussion at Consensus 2024. JPMorgan CEO Jaime Dimon, while acknowledging the bank's extensive use of blockchain, has been critical of cryptocurrencies, referring to them as "pet rock" on multiple occasions.