Over 15 Banks Race to Tokenize Finance, and It Could Affect Bitcoin
More than 15 of the world’s largest banks are building tokenized finance on private blockchains, and JPMorgan says that shift, not MicroStrategy, poses the bigger long-term threat to Bitcoin (BTC).
The bank’s analysts, led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, argue that if payments and assets move onto permissioned networks, public blockchains could lose activity, liquidity, and capital over time.
Wall Street Is Building Tokenized Finance at Scale
JPMorgan’s Kinexys platform has processed more than $3 trillion since inception and now clears over $7 billion a day. JPMorgan built it as Onyx in 2020 and renamed it Kinexys in 2024, as CEO Jamie Dimon kept criticizing Bitcoin.
Much of this activity runs on shared permissioned networks. On the Canton Network, DTCC is tokenizing the U.S. Treasuries it custodies, with a 2026 target. HSBC has completed a tokenized deposit pilot there, and Goldman Sachs settles tokenized bonds on the same rails.
That institutional pull now shows up in the fee data. Canton ranked as a top fee-generating chain this year. It earned about $60 million in the 30 days to late June, versus $11 million for Ethereum, according to DeFiLlama.
The push extends well beyond any single firm. More than 15 major banks are named in a shared tokenized deposit network from The Clearing House. The effort is part of a wider move to tokenized institutional settlement, targeting a 2027 launch, according to PYMNTS.
Why the Trend Could Weigh on Bitcoin
In a July 9 report, JPMorgan said the main risk to Bitcoin is blockchain adoption that skips public networks. Institutions prefer permissioned systems for their governance, privacy, and legal certainty.
The Bank for International Settlements has echoed that caution. It warned that public permissionless blockchains face scalability and financial-integrity challenges, and it backs regulated unified ledgers instead.
The stakes are measurable. Public chains host about $31 billion of tokenized real-world assets, roughly two-thirds of it on Ethereum (ETH), according to rwa.xyz.
JPMorgan expects much of that issuance and settlement to move to permissioned rails as the market grows.
However, the analysts framed MicroStrategy as a secondary concern. Its roughly 4% of Bitcoin’s supply and new MicroStrategy Bitcoin sales policy add short-term volatility, not a structural threat.
The counterargument is that Bitcoin’s value rests on scarcity and neutrality, not on powering everyday finance. Some advisors already prefer stablecoins and tokenization over direct Bitcoin exposure.
For now, banks are setting the pace, adopting blockchain on their own terms. Whether public networks capture a meaningful share of tokenized markets could define the next phase of crypto adoption.
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