In June, we reported that Umar Farooq, CEO of Onyx by JP Morgan, had been promoted to head of the Payments division. This appointment follows the departure of Takis Georgakopoulos. Going forward, Onyx’s blockchain business will be co-led by the division’s two most experienced executives, Naveen Mallela, who already leads Onyx Coin Systems, and Tyrone Lobban, the leader of Blockchain Launch and Onyx Digital Assets.
For a bank of its size, JP Morgan has been a major innovator in the blockchain space. Years before zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) were available on the public Ethereum blockchain, the bank concluded it needed a permissioned version and adopted ZKP for privacy, with help from ZCash. Work on Ethereum-based Quorum began in 2016, and it has become one of the top three enterprise blockchains.
In 2020, it concluded that managing permissioned blockchain technology was not really a bank’s role and transferred it to Consensys. Around the same time, it created the Onyx unit.
JP Morgan Onyx
Today, the JPM Coin blockchain-based bank account processes billions of dollars in transactions every day. Onyx has a portfolio of solutions including intraday repo, DLT collateral management, Liink for payment tracking, bond issuance and much more.
JP Morgan had the foresight to understand early on that Singapore was more interested in the technology than US regulators. It took part in Singapore’s Ubin project for CBDCs. This project gave rise to Partior for cross-border payments, alongside DBS Bank, Temasek and Standard Chartered.
Today, she continues to engage in Singapore’s broad DLT activities, including public blockchain experimentation through the Guardian Project and participation in Global Layer One (GL1), a new institutional network that aims to move closer to the openness of public blockchains.
This openness has rubbed off on the Onyx team. JPM Coin is now integrated via API with other solutions such as Broadridge’s DLR for intraday repo. In addition, it is opening its digital asset platform to third-party applications.
So far, the Onyx team has done a lot of things right. The fact that both leaders have been there from the beginning means that it is in good hands.
