JPMorgan completes first public tokenized treasury trade in partnership with Ondo Finance, Chainlink

Key Takeaways

JPMorgan completed its first public tokenized treasury trade on Ondo blockchain, using Chainlink’s protocol.
This development marks JPMorgan’s first interaction with a public blockchain, moving away from a private network.

JPMorgan Chase has completed its structured transaction on a public blockchain for the first time after years of operating exclusively within private, permissioned networks tailored to institutional clients, according to a Wednesday press release.

The testnet transaction was conducted in partnership with Ondo Finance, a major player in real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, and Chainlink, the leading cross-chain oracle network, using infrastructure provided by both firms and executed through JPMorgan’s blockchain division, Kinexys.

According to the companies, the trade involved the exchange of tokenized short-term US Treasuries issued on Ondo Chain, a newly launched layer 1 blockchain purpose-built for scalable, institutional-grade RWA issuance.

The payment leg of the transaction was processed through Kinexys Digital Payments, JPMorgan’s permissioned blockchain network, with Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) and Runtime Environment (CRE) coordinating the cross-chain settlement.

“By securely and thoughtfully connecting our institutional payments solution with both external public and private blockchain infrastructures seamlessly, we can offer our clients and the broader financial ecosystem a wider range of benefits and scalable solutions for settling transactions,” said Nelli Zaltsman, head of platform settlement solutions at Kinexys.

The move represents a key advance as the Delivery versus Payment (DvP) model, which was used to settle the transaction to ensure that the asset and payment are exchanged simultaneously while reducing counterparty risk, is rarely executed successfully across separate blockchain networks.

This DvP transaction was enabled through Chainlink’s cross-chain infrastructure, allowing secure, atomic settlement between JPMorgan’s private network and Ondo’s public blockchain.

The testnet transaction shows that real-world assets can now be issued, traded, and settled on-chain using compliant infrastructure, said Nathan Allman, CEO of Ondo Finance, in a statement.

Chainlink’s co-founder Sergey Nazarov said the move is a “clear sign” that major banks are moving beyond experimenting with public blockchain infrastructure to implementing it.

“Chainlink has been built to enable the secure and reliable execution of institutional-grade transactions just like this, across multiple blockchains and with the compliance required by large institutions like JPMorgan,” Nazarov stated.

“It is becoming increasingly clear to the world’s institutions that they have a large addressable market in the public chain community and that they need a reliable set of technical standards and cross-chain connection capabilities to successfully transact in this new world,” he added.

JPMorgan has been a pioneer among global banks in exploring and implementing tokenization. The bank’s tokenization initiatives have primarily relied on private, permissioned blockchains, especially through its Onyx platform.

It’s the first institutional-grade, production-focused integration of a public ledger using real assets, a decentralized middleware, and a repeatable architecture, although JPMorgan has previously explored blockchain-based interoperability.

Through it, the effort is elevated from experimentation to strategic deployment, potentially creating a template for future public-private financial infrastructure.