BNY Mellon and JP Morgan are accelerating the trading of digital assets. Each has more than a dozen job postings specific to digital assets or blockchain. BNY Mellon is developing digital cash and JP Morgan appears to be considering acquisitions.

BNY Mellon, digital assets and digital cash

BNY Mellon is the world’s largest global custodian, with $44 trillion in assets under custody. There are approximately 18 positions primarily related to digital assets, with dozens more mentioning digital assets in the job description.

Two points of interest are its strategy and the mention of digital money.

Regarding strategy, one of the BNY Mellon job posts states: “Our digital asset strategy is focused on expanding our core products to support this new asset class, building new businesses, and leveraging DLT as a capability to transform our services and modernize our infrastructure. ”

The most notable vacancy is the position of ‘Digital Cash Product Architect’.

We have asked BNY Mellon for more details on the nature of digital cash, but they declined to comment. Taking a step back, consider that the bank provides institutional custody for the cryptocurrencies. If you want to help settle crypto transactions, then on-chain cash would be useful.

Speculating how BNY Mellon’s digital cash might work, it could involve private tokenized money exchanging with a public stablecoin at the point of settlement. It is also conceivable that the bank could provide deposit tokens on a public blockchain along the lines of what JP Morgan has been discussing. But from a regulatory perspective, the latter currently lacks regulatory clarity.

The digital cash job description includes being a subject matter expert in:

• Regulatory implications for product design
• DLT through the lens of business and strategic applicability to product/LOB (line of business) and technical expertise in evolving trends
• Integration with a broader enterprise tokenization strategy.

The person will also develop ‘client and industry thought leadership in DLT and new technology development (eg parachutes, bridges etc.)’.

Meanwhile, BNY Mellon appointed Caroline Butler as CEO of the Digital Assets unit earlier this month.

Is JP Morgan considering acquisitions?

As for JP Morgan, it has around 15 open positions in its Onyx blockchain division in India, Greece and New York.

In addition to 15 direct Onyx openings, a handful of roles within JP Morgan payments relate to Onyx. A position in the payments division involves strategic investments and M&A integration. Part of the role covers the “broader strategic agenda for JP Morgan Payments, including priority initiatives related to Onyx/Liink/JPM Coin, API/Open Banking, integrated industry solutions (eg for marketplaces) and many more.” This could imply that acquisitions are on Onyx’s radar.

Another of the roles reveals that the Onyx Digital Assets blockchain network has processed $550 billion in transactions since its inception. This would include your repository network. (Broadridge’s DLT repository is a bit different, but makes $1 trillion a month.)

And the job postings make it clear that there are four pillars to Onyx’s job:

• JP Morgan’s Liink, a blockchain network of banks that facilitates payments and the exchange of bank information
• Coin Systems, a global provider of shared ledger solutions enabled by JPM Coin
• Onyx Digital Assets, a blockchain network that enables tokenization and creation of various types of digital assets
• Launch of Blockchain, web3’s innovation unit focused on conceptualizing and building new applications at the forefront of blockchain technology.

Meanwhile, JP Morgan has partnered with Oliver Wyman to promote deposit tokens that tokenize bank money on open networks.