What JPMD is, and why the structure matters

• JPMD is a tokenized version of a real-world bank deposit. It represents US dollars held at JPMorgan, issued to a permissioned group of institutional clients. It lives on Base, which means it can plug into Ethereum-based financial tools and applications. But it remains gated in terms of access and usage.
• This setup solves some long-standing frictions. In the case of most stablecoins, capital duplication is still a problem. You often need a separate reserve to make the system liquid, and institutions are forced to layer on legal wrappers to fit those assets into existing operations. With JPMD, there’s no extra reserve. No legal hacks. The dollar on-chain behaves like a dollar in the bank – because that’s exactly what it is.

  How private rails set the foundation:

• JPMorgan didn’t get here overnight. In 2019, it launched Onyx, a private blockchain designed to support internal operations, including liquidity corridors, treasury flows, and inter-entity settlements. Within that environment, the bank introduced JPM Coin, a digitised deposit token used for moving funds across entities faster than traditional rails allowed.

• Onyx proved valuable for closed-loop use cases, but as tokenized assets matured outside its walls – money market funds, repo agreements, FX – the limitations became clear. By 2024, it was time to expand.

• That’s when Onyx was rebranded to Kinexys, a move that signalled a shift from controlled networks to market-facing platforms. And JPM Coin itself was repositioned as Kinexys Digital Payments, with a broader mandate to enable asset-backed flows across connected platforms.

  JPMD now sits as a separate product – purpose-built to work in public blockchain environments, but with safeguards that align with how institutions operate.

  Why Base, and why this matters now: 

• Base, Coinbase’s Layer 2 network built on Ethereum, offers a balance that makes sense for JPMorgan. It delivers lower fees, faster throughput, and compatibility with Ethereum tooling. More importantly, it supports permissioned environments on top of public infrastructure – a design that mirrors what banks need.

• For JPMD, this means it can operate where tokenized assets live, without losing the protections expected by regulators and institutions. This alignment becomes crucial when the intent is not experimentation, but daily settlement, collateral movement, and capital efficiency at scale.

  Stablecoins showed demand – JPMD targets structure 

• Stablecoins deserve credit for proving that people want dollars on-chain. They enabled high-frequency trading, global remittance flows, and basic interoperability between crypto platforms. But they weren’t built for regulatory certainty.

• Many are backed by reserves that fluctuate in composition. Others operate under loosely defined legal frameworks, or depend on infrastructure that exists outside the scope of traditional oversight. For institutions, that creates friction. It means lawyers, workarounds, and operational disclaimers.

• JPMD answers those frictions. It brings the benefits of tokenized money – speed, programmability, compatibility – into a format that works for institutional workflows. You don’t have to build around it. You can build with it.