The Future of Wealth
Management
Ultra-ecient portfolios of traditional
and alternative investments powered
by tokenization
J.P. Morgan has been at the forefront of blockchain technology ever since we created Quorum (now Consensys
Quorum), a business-focused Ethereum fork with embedded privacy, in 2015.
Reecting on our blockchain achievements since then, the future always started with a bold idea.
In 2016, we envisioned a world where traditional assets could be represented on blockchains for seamless
settlement and instantaneous exchange for cash. In 2019, we realized that vision through the creation of the
JPM Coin System, a blockchain-based account ledger and payment rail, and in 2020 through the creation of Onyx
Digital Assets, our multi-asset tokenization platform on which we have settled over $900 billion
of tokenized U.S.
Treasuries to date, and through which we continue to bring innovative products to market.
In 2017, in collaboration with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), we envisioned a multi-bank payment
network as part of Project Ubin, a project wherein we undertook a variety of technical explorations over multiple
years. In 2021, we realized that vision with DBS and Temasek when we jointly launched Partior – the world’s rst
multi-bank blockchain network.
And today in 2023, in collaboration with Apollo, we have a new, bold vision: Creating a step change in the asset and
wealth management industry through a new paradigm for portfolio management.
In this future, we envision personalized investment portfolios at scale, with vastly simplied and streamlined order
execution and settlement processes, regardless of whether investing in traditional funds or alternative investments. A
future where portfolios can be automatically rebalanced in real time, at scale, across blockchain networks. In its nal
form, we see wealth managers being able to include alternative investments in model portfolios, providing investors
with better access to portfolio enhancing investments – not through sweeping changes to regulations or removal
of investor protections, but through streamlined, automated processing and settlement of trades in an asset class-
agnostic manner. This future is powered by blockchain technology, smart contracts and the tokenization of assets.
In the pages that follow, we expand on this vision and share details of an early-stage proof-of-concept that we
have built — a seed of an idea, but one that we invite the industry to join us in making a reality, just like those early
projects. We know this is a long journey, but as before, we believe we can get there.
We wouldn’t have been able to execute on this project without our incredible collaborators. Thank you to Apollo,
WisdomTree, J.P. Morgan Private Bank, Provenance Blockchain, Ava Labs, Oasis Pro, Axelar, LayerZero, and
Biconomy, and of course, thank you to MAS for pioneering the way with Project Guardian.
Tyrone Lobban
Managing Director, Head of Blockchain and Onyx Digital Assets
Onyx by J.P. Morgan
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J.P. Morgan
FOREWORD
Apollo is in the business of empowering retirees, building and nancing stronger businesses and helping to drive
a more sustainable future. We aim to generate excess returns for our clients through our asset management
business and provide a suite of retirement savings products through our retirement services business, Athene.
We dene Alternatives as simply an alternative to publicly traded stocks and bonds. Alternatives seek to generate
excess return per unit of risk across the risk-reward spectrum, from investment grade credit through to private
equity. The benets of including Alternatives in portfolio construction include access to a growing private markets
opportunity set with the potential for excess risk-adjusted returns, greater diversication, and lower volatility
proles when compared to public markets equivalents. Empirical studies show that including Alternatives in a
portfolio improves risk-adjusted returns while reducing volatility.
However, access to Alternatives has historically been limited to sophisticated institutional investors. We believe
more retirees and individual investors should have greater access to institutional quality, diversied investment
products, in formats tailored to their specic needs.
We are committed to democratizing access to Alternatives by developing a suite of investment and retirement
savings products suitable for dierent individual investor needs, as well as investing extensively in education,
including on-demand, no-cost content via Apollo Academy.
We are also investing in emerging technologies and rolling up our sleeves in the code to explore how we can make it as
easy to invest in Alternatives as it is to invest in public stocks and bonds. We are curious about how young technologies
can broaden access to institutional quality products while creating innovative and seamless client experiences.
We hope this technological project helps us level set on current state limitations and start an industry dialogue
on how we can build the future of asset management together. To unlock the benets of Alternatives for more
retirees, we are investing in tomorrow’s technology, today.
Industry collaboration will be key to the market infrastructure expansion required to expand access to Alternatives.
Open-mindedness to how nascent technologies can create new experiences is a prerequisite.
Special thanks to the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), J.P. Morgan, our digital strategy collaborators,
industry thought partners, and Apollo’s leadership team for actively participating on this journey into the future.
Christine Moy
Partner, Strategy - Digital Assets, Data & AI
Apollo
Apollo
FOREWORD
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Jason Singer
Partner, Head of Product Innovation
& Client Portfolio Management
Apollo
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J.P. Morgan
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Tyrone Lobban
Managing Director, Head of Blockchain and Onyx Digital Assets
Dennis Cristallo
Head of Wealth Management, Onyx Digital Assets
dennis.cris[email protected]
Nikhil Sharma
Head of Growth, Onyx Digital Assets
nikhil.b.sharma@jpmchase.com
Keerthi Moudgal
Head of Product, Onyx Digital Assets
keert[email protected]
Joe Leung
Senior Technical Product Manager, Onyx Digital Assets
Marlee Burr
Senior Product Manager, Onyx Digital Assets
Kirsten Jones
Senior Product Manager, Onyx Digital Assets & Blockchain Launch
Stephanie Lok
Product Manager, Onyx Digital Assets
AUTHORS
Sudhir Upadhyay
Head of Engineering, Onyx by J.P. Morgan
sudhir[email protected]
Manmeet Ahluwalia
Head of Engineering, Onyx Digital Assets
manmeet.ahluwalia@jpmchase.com
Jitendra Bhurat
Senior Lead Software Engineer, Onyx Digital Assets
jitendra.bhur[email protected]
Chang Yang Jiao
Lead Software Engineer, Onyx Digital Assets
chang.y.jiao@jpmchase.com
Ganesh Anantwar
Software Engineer III, Onyx Digital Assets
ganesh.anant[email protected]
Abhishek Agarwal
Software Engineer III, Onyx Digital Assets
abhishek.x4.agarwal@jpmchase.com
Shivjeet Singh
Software Engineer II, Onyx Digital Assets
shivjeet.singh@jpmchase.com
Dwayne Richards
Software Engineer II, Onyx Digital Assets
dwayne[email protected]
Sowgandhi Bhattu
Software Engineer I, Onyx Digital Assets
sowgandhi.bhat[email protected]
CONTRIBUTORS
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Apollo
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Virender Bedi
Managing Director, Head of Client & Product Solutions
and Digital Engineering
J.P. Vicente
Managing Director, Head of Content Strategy
jpvicent[email protected]
Nicole Parina
Senior PM, Strategy – Digital Assets, Data & AI
Yuna Chu
Senior PM, Strategy – Digital Assets, Data & AI
CONTRIBUTORS
Christine Moy
Partner, Strategy – Digital Assets, Data & AI
Jason Singer
Partner, Head of Product Innovation & Client Portfolio Management
Vivian Sze
Director, Product Strategy & Intelligence
vsze@apollo.com
AUTHORS
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Foreword - J.P. Morgan
Foreword - Apollo
Authors and contributors
Vision statement: Creating a step change in the asset and wealth management industry through a new
paradigm for portfolio management
Current state: Limitations in discretionary portfolio management in the wealth management industry
Thesis: Tokenization could harmonize the treatment of public and private assets in portfolio
management, creating signicant value for asset and wealth managers and investors
The proof-of-concept: Delivering a scalable next generation system for seamless portfolio management
Behind the scenes: A technical deep dive into the proof-of-concept
Expanded overview of proof-of-concept components
Cross-chain interoperability
Onyx Digital Assets Fungible Asset Contract (ODA-FACT) token standard
Account Abstraction
Key learnings: Potential benets and considerations
Industry call to action: The future of wealth management combines public and private assets eciently
to deliver better portfolios
Table of Contents
02
03
04
07
10
15
17
22
39
39
45
47
50
55
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The continued development of multi-party, multi-asset shared ledgers with automated
workows - enabled by blockchain technology - has created new possibilities for asset and
wealth management rms.
Within the wealth management industry, building and managing discretionary portfolios for wealthy individuals
is a $5.5 trillion business
1
that enables millions of investors to meet their nancial goals. The top rms in this
space have built robust and sustainable businesses that have delivered results for their investors. However,
wealth management rms’ ability to create innovative solutions and realize further eciencies on today's legacy
technology infrastructure is limited.
Blockchain technology, tokenization and smart contracts
2
could open a broader design space on which rms can
build the next generation of managed solutions, including alternative investment funds that historically have been
more dicult to access.
Alternative investments (“alts”), such as private equity, private credit, real estate, and infrastructure, can oer
attractive risk-adjusted returns as well as portfolio diversication benets, generally in exchange for less liquidity.
As a result, some of the world’s most sophisticated institutional investors allocate a signicant portion of their
assets to these investments. Demand from individual investors for alternative investments continues to grow, but
adoption lags that of public and traditional investments. Key challenges stem from the less liquid nature of the
underlying assets, limited access and a lack of investor and advisor education.
These challenges have limited the inclusion of alts in model portfolios, which are standardized investment solutions,
typically designed and oered by private banks, wirehouses and registered investment advisors (collectively
referred to as wealth managers in this paper), that represent dierent risk-return preferences and objectives
for investors. Solving the alts-related challenges represent a massive opportunity for wealth managers – and
potentially institutional allocators – to oer higher quality portfolios more eciently. It also presents an opportunity
for alternative investment managers to further distribute their solutions, and for investors to benet from the
nancial security that comes from more resilient multi-asset class portfolios.
To-date, alternatives managers have focused on expanding individuals’ access through the development of semi-liquid
product structures. These products typically oer periodic liquidity that gives investors more exibility compared to
multi-year lockups of institutional funds, while still being an appropriate match for the underlying investment holdings.
1
The Cerulli Report U.S. Managed Accounts 2023 Decisions About Discretion
2
Tokenization refers to the process of representing an asset’s ownership records on a multi-party, multi-asset, single-source shared ledger using blockchain
technology, while smart contracts are self-executing computer code libraries that encode rules-based workows and can automate asset and value transfer
between multiple parties on the shared ledger.
Note: The information herein is provided for informational and discussion purposes only and should not be construed as nancial or investment advice, nor should
any information in this document be relied on when making an investment decision. All funds mentioned herein are hypothetical and for illustrative purposes only.
Opinions and views expressed reect the current opinions and views of the authors as of the date hereof and are subject to change. Please see the end of this
document for important disclosure information.
Creating a step change in the asset and wealth management industry
through a new paradigm for portfolio management
Vision statement
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Looking ahead, however, we believe these eorts can be signicantly accelerated with the development of new
capabilities in operational processing, availability of secondary liquidity by tokenizing fund positions on a shared
ledger system, availability of detailed reporting and consolidation of fragmented investor ownership registries
(which will continue to fragment with the emergence of tokenization across new blockchain network registries).
Our goal in this project, therefore, was to identify a technology approach that could enable a wealth manager
to easily construct, deploy and automatically manage model portfolios at scale, across traditional and alternative
assets, allowing a seamless investor experience with improved transparency.
In this paper, we present a proof-of-concept (POC) that demonstrates how emerging technologies, such as
tokenization and smart contracts, could potentially achieve this goal.
The vision for this technology layer is to enable the management of many separately managed accounts at scale,
preserving unique investor-level account customizations and reporting, while enabling the wealth manager to eect
changes to all portfolios by adjusting their reference model portfolios. With the use of blockchain technology, it
may be possible to expand the coordination and transaction of more types of assets across multiple managers on
shared ledgers to accrue even more eciency and expand the investable universe and potential liquidity. Testing
these technologies, we aim to address the following:
•
How can we improve the eciency and scalability of order execution and settlement across multiple asset
classes and ownership registries?
•
How can we enable the inclusion of alternative investments in model portfolios, given their operational
dierences and limited liquidity compared to traditional public assets?
•
How can we overcome the fragmentation and interoperability challenges posed by multiple ownership
registries developed on dierent technology protocols?
•
How can we simplify the use of multi-asset, shared ledgers through the abstraction of technical complexities
unique to the use of blockchain technology?
Onyx by J.P. Morgan (Onyx) and Apollo approached this project from a solution-agnostic perspective and consulted
with experts and practitioners within wealth management, alternative asset management and fund administration.
Onyx and Apollo collaborated with a leading asset manager and pioneer in fund tokenization, WisdomTree, and invited
input from several industry experts who are leaders in their respective elds: J.P. Morgan Private Bank, Provenance
Blockchain, Ava Labs, Oasis Pro, Axelar, LayerZero, and Biconomy. Each participant contributed expertise and/or
infrastructure to design and implement a technical POC that showcased the following capabilities:
•
Ownership record-keeping across multi-party, multi-asset shared ledgers
•
Automated portfolio deployment of cash into tokenized alternative investment and traditional investment
fund vehicles
3
•
Cross-asset model portfolio rebalancing through automated order execution and settlement across
alternative investments, public assets, and cash
•
Communication and interoperability across ownership records
•
Improved user experiences through the abstraction of back-end technical complexitie3
3
Notably, the Singapore Variable Capital Company (“VCC”) which has the exibility to support open- or closed-ended funds and can potentially serve as the
structure to underpin the investor’s separately managed account envisioned in this POC.
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This POC was conducted under the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) collaborative
initiative, Project Guardian, which seeks to explore asset tokenization and cross chain
interoperability on permissioned blockchain networks. This POC is one of several industry
pilots that are taking place under Project Guardian. All of the infrastructure used in the
POC was private and permissioned, and no real value was transacted.
4
The main sections of this paper are as follows:
•
Current state: describes limitations in discretionary portfolio management in the wealth management
industry
•
Thesis: describes how tokenization could harmonize the treatment of public and private assets in portfolio
management, creating signicant value for asset and wealth managers and investors
•
The proof-of-concept: elaborates on delivering a scalable, next generation system for seamless portfolio
management
•
Behind the scenes: provides a technical deep-dive into the proof-of-concept
•
Key learnings: elaborates on benets and considerations
•
Industry call-to-action: expands on how the future of wealth management combines public and private
assets eciently to deliver better portfolios
4
https://www.mas.gov.sg/schemes-and-initiatives/project-guardian
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Limitations in discretionary portfolio management
in the wealth management industry
Wealth management rms work with clients in a variety of capacities. Their oerings can generally be broken down
as advisory or discretionary:
•
Advisory: In an advisory or brokerage relationship, the wealth management rm provides an investor with
advice, generally through a series of individual trade or fund recommendations. If the investor agrees, he/she
can act on that advice, but the wealth management rm cannot act on the investor’s behalf.
•
Discretionary: In a discretionary relationship, the investor and portfolio manager (PM) agree on an
investment objective, allowing the PM to make ongoing investment decisions on behalf of the investor without
requiring further approvals. To provide this service at scale, the chief investment ocers (“CIO”) at these
rms dene model portfolios representing collections of assets combined to achieve dierent risk and return
proles. For example, a balanced ESG-focused portfolio would seek long-term capital appreciation with
moderate volatility by investing in strategies across multiple asset types that emphasize sustainability. These
model portfolios contain approved investments and recommended weightings by asset class as a template for
PMs. An example model portfolio allocation may have 50% in equities, 30% in xed income and 20% in alts.
Public assets such as equities, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and mutual funds benet from industry-wide
settlement venues, straight-through processing technology, improved real-time access to asset and market data, a
broader range of market participants, and therefore, increased liquidity and accessibility. As a result, these assets
are well suited to the discretionary model.
In contrast, alts are commonly oered on an advisory basis, where a wealth management rm curates a short list
of approved funds from which clients can select and invest. If clients agree to subscribe to these funds, wealth
managers guide clients through the process; however, clients ultimately must complete the subscription documents
themselves and direct the movement of funds. The result is that the process of subscribing individual investors to
alts has embedded friction, which limits distribution at scale, despite the portfolio enhancing characteristics that
alts can oer.
Current state
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Problem statements
Adjusting portfolio allocations across asset types (both public and private) requires multiple systems,
manual processes and multiparty reconciliation.
The process of adjusting portfolio allocations through transaction order management, execution and settlement
involves multiple systems and manual intervention by disparate teams. It is not uncommon for PMs to manually
calculate trades on spreadsheets and submit trade tickets to operations teams specializing in processing
transactions for specic investment vehicles. The operations professionals then interface with the funds’ transfer
agents or trading venues to submit orders and coordinate cash movement. An extensive reconciliation process
across multiple participants is required to ensure investors’ cash and investment balances reect the PM allocation
plan. This process regularly occurs for dozens of investment options over tens of thousands of client portfolios.
These friction points also negatively aect client outcomes. Ineciencies related to receiving cash proceeds from sell
orders results in PMs maintaining a cash buer to ensure they can simultaneously place buy orders. This excess cash
is a meaningful opportunity cost for the end investor and prevents them from maximizing their potential returns.
Alternative investment funds are not commonly included in model portfolios due to operational processing
requirements and limited liquidity
Portfolios that include alts have historically delivered better risk-adjusted returns than portfolios without them.
5
Despite this, CIOs at wealth management rms are generally not facilitating robust allocations to private alts within
their discretionary portfolios for two main reasons:
•
Operational processing requirements can be high-touch, non-standard and fragmented.
–
Subscribing to alts typically requires paper-intensive subscription and redemption processes that do
not easily scale to a broad swathe of investors.
–
Operational processing of alts involves coordinating across several stakeholders, such as fund
administrators, transfer agents, general partners (GPs), wealth managers and distributors,
and end investors.
–
Operationally cumbersome and manual complex reconciliations resulting from an ecosystem of
disconnected systems, make it dicult to scale alternatives to a broader set of investors at lower
allocation sizes.
–
Checking and detailed documenting of investor identity, AML/KYC status, and suitability creates
signicant frictions that discourages service providers from adding alts to discretionary portfolios.
•
Liquidity is limited given the nature of the underlying investments and the less-mature market infrastructure
technology.
–
Alts can generate excess returns compared to public assets because the underlying investment
strategies have more exibility to invest in higher returning assets that may be less liquid and held for a
longer investment period. As a result, alts fund structures are less liquid than public assets.
1.
2.
5
https://www.apollo.com/insights-news/insights/2022/07/how-alternatives-can-address-your-portfolio-blues.html
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Additionally, recommending an allocation to alts often presents a learning curve for both wealth managers and
their individual investors. Unlike traditional assets like stocks and bonds, alts encompass a wide range of asset
types, each with its own unique characteristics, risks, and potential returns. Understanding and explaining these
nuances requires a signicant amount of time, eort, and reference information, which can be daunting for wealth
managers managing a large set of clients, and especially individual investors who may not be focused on learning
about nancial products full-time.
Access to and distribution of tokenized assets is fragmented across blockchain networks
In recent years, tokenization of assets has gained traction and adoption across industries, often to address the
operational ineciencies described above. The inherent capabilities of blockchain networks to unify bookkeeping and
computation make it possible to leverage tokenization of traditional assets and the benets that come therefrom.
While traditional assets have been represented on blockchain networks through standardized token representations
and logic, these ecosystems have developed in a fragmented manner - creating tradeos where benets are gained
at the expense of aggregated liquidity. Consequently, dozens of permissionless public and permissioned private
networks have resulted in isolated ecosystems, with disjointed users, applications, and liquidity pools. These networks
employ dierent security models, consensus mechanisms, and development environments, preventing value and
data ow between networks. This fragmentation has spurred the emergence of interoperability protocols that act
as bridges that connect disparate digital islands. Just as tokenization standardized asset representation on-chain,
interoperability solutions aim to standardize how these siloed ecosystems communicate to enable seamless cross-
chain transactions while still allowing decentralized development to continue within each chain.
3.
What is tokenization?
Tokenization refers to the process of representing an asset’s ownership records on a multi-party, multi-asset
shared ledger using blockchain technology, while smart contracts are self-executing computer code libraries that
encode rules-based workows to automate asset and value transfer between multiple parties on the shared ledger.
This fusion of data and computation makes automated, near instantaneous settlement feasible by bringing together
multiple asset types to share the same tech platform, transactional protocol, and tech standards.
The resulting normalization can enable signicant improvement over today’s lengthy, multi-party processes involving
siloed data and costly reconciliations.
Over the past decade, two standard methods of tokenizing traditional assets have emerged:
Asset-Backed Tokenization: In this approach, the traditional asset continues to be recorded and custodied in
existing legacy systems like transfer agent registries, bank ledgers, or trust company or custodian accounts.
The traditional asset is immobilized in underlying ledgers and a digital pointer (in the form of a smart contract
based token) is then created on a blockchain as a representation of an investor's claim on the asset. This
establishes a digital twin of the traditional asset, similar to how depository receipts mirror securities held
in custody. The value of asset-backed tokens is the same as the underlying asset – because the blockchain-
based representation is not a new asset.
1.
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2.
6
Onyx by J.P. Morgan; https://www.broadridge.com/article/capital-markets/dlr-transacts-1-trillion-a-month
Native Asset Tokenization: In this approach, the nancial instrument itself is issued natively as a smart contract
based token on a blockchain, encapsulating the inherent contractual rights and obligations without requiring
external asset backing. Bonds, equities, fund shares and many other nancial instruments can be represented
as native tokens. They are valued in the same way as 'non-blockchain' asset types but the books and records
of ownership and transfer exist only on the blockchain without necessarily depending on legacy tech systems.
Tokenization of assets is a concept that has been around for several years, and steady progress has been made
more recently to demonstrate how multiple asset types across multiple jurisdictions can be tokenized using both
the asset-backed and native issuance approaches (See timeline on page 15).
In 2015, Ethereum was the rst platform that uniquely enabled developers to build decentralized applications and
deploy them on its public network. This sparked substantial experimentation, as developers leveraged Ethereum's
ability to run compatible apps built anywhere. In 2016, institutions like J.P. Morgan adapted blockchain technology
to represent traditional assets as tokens on private blockchain networks, entirely disconnected from legacy
systems. Early small-scale experimentation with tokenized commercial paper, bonds, receivables and real estate
demonstrated potential benets. However, lack of connectivity to legacy infrastructure resulted in these eorts
not reaching any meaningful scale.
After the initial waves of experimentation, a new model emerged that saw legacy systems integrate with blockchain
networks. This made it possible for traditional assets to continue to reside on traditional ledgers, whilst creating
“digital twins” on blockchain-based recordkeeping systems. By bridging legacy infrastructure with blockchain
networks, traditional assets could be mobilized to take advantage of the eciencies and automation that
blockchains enabled. This integrated model has seen broad adoption, with trillions in nancial instruments tokenized
across permissioned institutional networks beginning in 2017.
6
Overall, as interest in tokenization of traditional assets has grown and digital asset infrastructure has matured, many
banks and ntechs now oer “tokenization services” to assist issuers in digitally issuing and distributing products
on blockchain networks. Licensed providers that are integrated across multiple blockchains can bridge both
permissioned and permissionless networks as well as legacy systems - oering a convenient on-ramp. For example, in
this POC, Onyx tokenized representations of Apollo and WisdomTree funds on Onyx Digital Assets, J.P. Morgan’s
agship multi-asset tokenization platform and Ethereum-based permissioned blockchain network, and Oasis Pro
tokenized representations of other Apollo funds on a Provenance Blockchain permissioned zone.
The continued experimentation with tokenized assets by global nancial institutions such as banks, custodians,
fund administrators, and asset managers points to a potential future where multiple participants can transact
across multiple assets types in a seamless and automated way, enabling new approaches to portfolio construction,
management, and distribution at scale.
Key milestones in Traditional Financial Assets Tokenization
Laying the foundations for the transformation of the global nancial infrastructure
MAS Tested a digital representation of SGD for interbank settlement on R3 Corda, with privacy on permissioned Ethereum (Quorum)
J.P. Morgan, National Bank of Canada Issued $150mm certicate of deposit on permissioned Ethereum (Quorum)
MAS Tested Interbank Real-Time Gross Settlement Systems across R3 Corda, Hyperledger Fabric, and permissioned Ethereum (Quorum)
LuxDeco Issued bond denominated in ether on Ethereum
Tether Surpassed a market cap of $1bn USD Stablecoin, USDT, on Ethereum
Credit Suisse, ING Conducted €25mm securities lending transaction on R3 Corda
Sberbank Completed 750mm rubles commercial bond transaction on Hyperledger Fabric
MAS, SGX Developed DVP capabilities to enable asset settlement on permissioned Ethereum (Quorum) and on permissioned Anquan
World Bank, Commonwealth Bank of Australia Issued AU$110mm bond on permissioned Ethereum (Bond-i)
Paxos Issued USD Stablecoin, USDP, on Ethereum
Centre (Circle, Coinbase) Issued USD Stablecoin, USDC, on Ethereum
St. Regis Aspen Issued real estate equity on Ethereum
Komgo Issued digital letter of credit on permissioned Ethereum
J.P. Morgan Launched USD payments product, JPMCoin, on permissioned Ethereum (Quorum)
BBVA Issued green structured bond on Hyperledger Fabric
Societe Generale Issued €100mm covered bond on Ethereum
MAS, Bank of Canada, Bank of England Tested cross-border and cross-currency CBDC payments on permissioned Ethereum (Quorum)
and R3 Corda
Franklin Templeton Recorded money market fund share ownership on Stellar
Santander Issued $20mm bond on Ethereum
Paxos Recorded allocated gold ownership on Ethereum
Bank of China Issued ¥19.4bn bond on Neo
Jeeries, Nomura, Tilden Park Capital, DoubleLine Issued asset-backed security based on $159mm loans originated on Provenance Blockchain
Vanguard Completed pilot of asset-backed security on Symbiont DLT
MAS, Temasek, J.P. Morgan Developed multi-currency payments network supporting DVP settlements, conditional payments and escrow
for Trade, and payment commitments for Trade Finance on permissioned Ethereum (Quorum)
Olam International, SGX, HSBC, Temasek Issued S$400mm syndicated bond on Canton
J.P. Morgan Launched Intraday Repo with U.S. Treasuries and USD (JPMCoin) on permissioned Ethereum (Onyx Digital Assets)
DBS, J.P. Morgan, Temasek Launched Partior, platform to digitize M1 commercial bank money to reduce current frictions and latency for
cross-border payments, trade transactions and foreign exchange settlements on permissioned Ethereum (Quorum)
EIB, Goldman Sachs, Santander, Societe Generale Issued €100mm bond on Ethereum
Societe Generale Issued €5mm structured note on Tezos
Arca Labs Issued 40 Act Treasuries Fund on Ethereum
Banque de France, Euroclear Completed pilot settlement of French Government Bonds for CBDC on Hyperledger Fabric
Apollo Completed origination and ownership transfer of digital mortgages on Provenance Blockchain
BlockTower, MakerDAO Issued $220mm credit fund on Ethereum
BNP Paribas Issued renewable energy bond on Ethereum
BNY Mellon, Goldman Sachs Executed agency securities lending transactions on R3 Corda (HQLAx)
KKR Enabled access to private equity fund on Avalanche
Apollo Enabled access to private fund on Provenance Blockchain
Hamilton Lane Enabled access to private equity and private credit funds on Polygon
J.P. Morgan Executed FX transaction (SGD/JPY) on Polygon, as part of MAS Project Guardian
EIB, Goldman Sachs, Santander, Societe Generale, Banque de France, Banque Central du Luxembourg Issued €100mm bond on
permissioned Canton (GS DAP)
Sberbank Recorded gold ownership on Hyperledger Fabric, accessible by Ethereum
WisdomTree Enabled access to a variety of mutual funds on Ethereum and Stellar
EIB Issued £50mm bond on Hyperledger Fabric (HSBC Orion)
HKMA Issued HK$800mm green bond on both permissioned Canton and Hyperledger Besu
Siemens Issued €60mm bond on Polygon
Franklin Templeton Issued 40 Act money market fund on Stellar and Polygon (last reported AUM of $270mm as of April 2023)
Paypal Issued USD Stablecoin, PYUSD, on Ethereum
Citi Agented over $900bn in syndicated loan commitments on Canton (Versana)
UBS Issued VCC money market fund on Ethereum, as part of MAS' Project Guardian
J.P. Morgan, Blackrock, Barclays Tokenized money market fund shares for collateral on permissioned Ethereum (Onyx Digital Assets)
J.P. Morgan, Apollo, WisdomTree Tested automated discretionary portfolio construction and rebalancing across multiple asset types
(USD, private funds, mutual funds) on permissioned Ethereum (Onyx Digital Assets), Provenance Blockchain, and Avalanche, as part of
MAS' Project Guardian
Disclaimer: This list is not comprehensive of all tokenization events.
Sources: Apollo, BBVA, BlockWorks, Bloomberg, BNP Paribas, Business Insider, Business Wire, Centrifuge, Coindesk, Cointelegraph,
Credit-Suisse, DTCC, Euroclear, Fintech News, Finyear, Forbes, Franklin Templeton, Global Finance, HKMA, HSBC, Ledger Insights,
Marketplace Capital, NBC, Reuters, Santander, Siemens, Societe Generale, Vanguard, World Bank, Yahoo
Note: Following Consensys’ August 2020 acquisition of Quorum, the project was rebranded to Consensys Quorum.
2016 - 2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
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Taking meaningful steps towards realizing our vision revolves around delivering two key theses.
Creating new, connected infrastructure can streamline, simplify and normalize the investment and
operational processes related to building and managing portfolios
This technology change could revolutionize the wealth management business by fundamentally redesigning how
portfolios are accessed, assembled and managed. Ultimately, we believe this could result in providing clients with
better access to higher quality investment portfolios in a more ecient and personalized manner.
Achieving this could revolutionize the discretionary portfolio management business by enabling the seamless
deployment and automatic rebalancing of a large number of portfolios. Additionally, it could make the case for
including alts in discretionary model portfolios signicantly stronger as operating standards between traditional
assets and alts converge. Successful implementation in the near term would be most benecial to the group
of individual investors who are currently able to invest in alts (but may be under-allocated). Examples of these
investors include Qualied Purchasers, Accredited investors, and knowledgeable employees of asset managers.
They could nd it easier to initiate or increase their portfolio allocation to alts, which could grow the demand for
alts without any change to investor suitability requirements.
The tokenization of alts can reshape the alternative investment landscape, making it more inclusive,
transparent and ecient
Once a small allocation, alts have now become a core investment strategy for institutional investors. These
investments—which include non-traditional asset classes such as private equity, private credit, real estate and
infrastructure – have emerged as a cornerstone of institutional investor allocations, while individual investors have
largely missed out on higher-quality portfolios.
We believe tokenization can increase access to alts by simplifying downstream processes and reducing
cumbersome operational workows. When combined with potentially improved liquidity, tokenization could enable
PMs to include private alts into discretionary portfolios, improving their quality in the process.
More broadly, the tokenization of private alts funds represents a $400 billion annual revenue opportunity for alts
fund managers and distributors.
7
Including these investments in model portfolios and developing new client-friendly
features such as automated capital calls and investor-level personalization could help unlock this opportunity.
Tokenization could harmonize the treatment of public and private assets
in portfolio management, creating signicant value for asset and wealth
managers and investors
Thesis
1.
2.
7
Source: Revenue opportunity estimates are based on projections from Bain and Onyx by J.P. Morgan’s market research.
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Potential benets to validate
•
Greater eciency: Leveraging smart contracts to represent and record the ownership of assets could
collapse the PM and operations roles into a single automated process, enabling portfolios to be deployed
and rebalanced programmatically at scale. The presence of cash and fund ownership records on a shared
ledger, combined with smart contract-enabled trade execution, could limit the need for costly reconciliations
and occurrence of trade errors. At scale, the time and cost savings could allow wealth managers to reinvest
in research and client-facing services like educating clients on how alts could t into their portfolios.
Eciency benets could accrue to others in the ecosystem as well, including asset managers, fund
administrators, and other service providers.
From an investor perspective, eliminating these friction points could enable PMs to be fully invested more
consistently, meaning their portfolios would experience less cash drag. Assuming the average PM holds ~3%
cash and a balanced portfolio could generate ~8% over cash in the long-term, the net result to a client is a
~24bps reduction in costs.
8
•
Potentially improved liquidity: Given the ease of sharing information across multiple parties on the same
ledger system, and the ability to easily transfer ownership of tokenized assets, representing assets such as
alts on a blockchain could potentially facilitate better liquidity markets for these assets. Today, selling an
alts holding on a secondary market is typically a manual process negotiated on a bilateral basis. This can
become problematic for individual investors, as oftentimes their holdings are not large enough to attract
buyers given the time and paperwork required to complete a transaction. Simplifying these operational
processes using smart contracts, coupled with alternative liquidity methods, such as the automated netting
of subscriptions and redemptions, could add additional liquidity levers.
•
Enhanced investment outcomes through alternative investments: Streamlined processes and enhanced
liquidity, as described above, could allow alternatives to be included in model portfolios and improve
expected returns for investors and/or reduce volatility. It may also be possible to automatically rebalance
portfolios based on changes to model portfolios, which could minimize deviations from target asset
allocations, resulting in portfolios that align better with their optimal state.
•
Combining the eciency of robo-advisory with the alpha of active management: Automated portfolio
construction and management could provide a streamlined experience similar to robo-advisory oerings, but
with a dedicated PM and higher potential returns through three sources of alpha: 1) the inclusion of alts; 2)
manager due diligence on active strategies (e.g. identifying a top large cap growth fund); and 3) setting top-
down asset class allocations based on CIO macro insights.
•
Flexibility and broader access: Leveraging interoperability solutions to connect distinct blockchain networks
could provide access to tokenized investments across disparate chains, allowing PMs to build holistic
solutions with the inclusion of these investment opportunities, which otherwise might not be accessible.
8
Cash drag is calculated assuming a 3% allocation to cash could be invested in a portfolio earning 8% over the long-term, the product of which is 24bps.
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With our vision, problem statements and thesis dened, we constructed a POC to prove how portfolio management
systems built using new technologies, such as blockchain and smart contracts, could provide the early-stage proof
points needed to validate our assumptions.
We looked to demonstrate one simple, yet powerful, idea in the POC:
Enable a portfolio manager to seamlessly manage a large number of discretionary portfolios, comprised of an
array of tokenized traditional and alternative investments across various blockchains, all whilst preserving
unique investor-level account customizations.
To execute this idea, we brought together a multifaceted group of fund managers, blockchain infrastructure
providers, interoperability solutions and tokenization platforms to work in concert to create an end-to-end
ecosystem of assets and connected networks.
In recognition that blockchain technology and blockchain ecosystems are still relatively nascent, we wanted to
explore a diversity of protocols and solutions. Specically, we wanted to connect Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)
and non-EVM blockchain networks and to experiment with dierent interoperability design paradigms.
Furthermore, we sought to explore how modern architectures, enabling permissioned public blockchain infrastructure
instances, could be leveraged.
To explore how the solution could provide frictionless user experiences to traditional wealth managers, we leveraged
Account Abstraction technology that removes the complexities of managing keys and holding cryptocurrencies that
are typically required in some networks to pay for network fees.
Finally, we designed a front-end portfolio construction and management prototype called Crescendo to illustrate
how to bring the vision to life for both PMs and investors.
Delivering a scalable next-gen system for seamless
portfolio management
The proof-of-concept
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We set up the POC as follows:
•
Onyx Digital Assets was used as the base chain that connected to other blockchain networks in the project
via designated interoperability solutions. Onyx Digital Assets is a general-purpose tokenization platform that
Onyx established in 2020 and has processed more than $900 billion of tokenized assets since launch. As an
EVM blockchain with connectivity to J.P. Morgan infrastructure, Onyx Digital Assets provided the optimal
launchpad for executing the POC.
•
A representative PM established discretionary portfolios, model portfolios and cash balances for investors
on Onyx Digital Assets. Each discretionary portfolio was linked to a specic model such that the portfolio
would track the target asset allocation as dened in that model.
9
•
Representative traditional and alternative investment strategies (fund vehicles) from J.P. Morgan Private
Bank, Apollo and WisdomTree were tokenized on three blockchain networks: Onyx Digital Assets, Provenance
Blockchain and Avalanche. All three instances were established as permissioned networks—a permissioned
zone in the case of Provenance Blockchain, and a permissioned subnet in the case of Avalanche (for ease we
will refer to these permissioned instances simply as Provenance Blockchain and Avalanche). A standardized
token, the Onyx Digital Assets Fungible Asset Contract (ODA-FACT), was used to enable consistent
interaction and represent funds on each network. Using the ODA-FACT token standard, Onyx tokenized J.P.
Morgan, Apollo and WisdomTree funds on Onyx Digital Assets, and WisdomTree funds on the Avalanche
chain. Oasis Pro tokenized Apollo funds on Provenance Blockchain.
10
•
Interoperability solutions were put in place to provide connectivity between the networks. Specically, Axelar
was used to connect Onyx Digital Assets (an EVM chain) to Provenance Blockchain (a non-EVM chain), and
LayerZero was used to connect Onyx Digital Assets to Avalanche (also an EVM chain).
•
Account abstraction infrastructure and contracts were established on Avalanche to enable “gasless”
interactions for the fund manager operating on that network through Biconomy.
9
The model portfolio allocations illustrated in this report and POC are not intended to represent actual model portfolio allocations. Instead, these are representative
allocations used to demonstrate the technological capabilities of the POC.
10
Please note: WisdomTree tokenizes WisdomTree digital funds today through their own tokenization platform and transfer agency. This proof of concept is
intended to showcase the end-to-end ability to streamline portfolio management processes and is not intended to be representative of WisdomTree’s existing
infrastructure for tokenized funds in the market today.
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With the infrastructure in place, we executed a series of tests to demonstrate what the next generation of
portfolio management could look like:
Notably we showed that the PM was able to update the target asset allocation for a given model (i.e., replace
one asset for another), and the system automatically rebalanced all investor portfolios that tracked that model
by initiating, placing and settling orders to redeem from and subscribe into the relevant funds, even though those
funds were held on three dierent chains.
Additionally, we showed that when an investor deployed more capital for investment, the system could automatically
place and settle orders in the right allocations according to the model, irrespective of what asset types were
included in the model, or on which chain those assets were recorded.
Essentially, by tokenizing funds and representing discretionary portfolios as smart contracts, we showed how tens
of thousands of portfolios could be programmatically linked to representative models and automatically rebalanced
en-masse when changes to those models occurred—even when these models included alternative investments.
The multi-chain, multi-portfolio, multi-manager POC ecosystem and the Crescendo portfolio management solution
are illustrated in the images below.
End-to-end portfolio management & interoperability POC
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The PM’s landing page on Crescendo oers a snapshot of their model portfolios, key statistics related to performance, and relevant
resources. This is their one-stop shop for creating new model portfolios and engaging with investors.
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The portfolio manager can click into one of their model portfolios and view details such as model performance, fund allocations, fund
performance, and subscribed investors.
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This section provides a technical walkthrough of the entire POC, however, does not provide explanations of
underlying blockchain concepts (e.g., consensus protocols or smart contracts).
To deliver the POC, the Onyx team:
Established and operated Onyx Digital Assets test blockchain and platform infrastructure
Collaborated with Provenance Blockchain, Ava Labs, Axelar, LayerZero, and Biconomy to set up the required
blockchain, interoperability and Account Abstraction infrastructure
Developed core smart contracts and o-chain services to represent model portfolios, discretionary portfolios
and funds
Built an automated portfolio rebalancing system with end-to-end cross-chain trade execution and settlement
Designed Crescendo, the front-end portfolio construction and management prototype that illustrated how
the vision could be brought to life for both PMs and investors
A technical deep dive into the proof-of-concept
Behind the scenes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
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Infrastructure overview
Infrastructure Description
Onyx Digital Assets Permissioned EVM chain used for registering test fund assets (from J.P. Morgan
Private Bank, Apollo, WisdomTree), model portfolios, investor portfolios, order
routing and cash settlement via deposit tokens. Additionally, enabled rebalancing
and connectivity to interoperability platforms.
Avalanche subnet
(Avalanche)
Permissioned instance of the Avalanche blockchain used for registering fund assets
from WisdomTree.
Provenance Blockchain Zone
(Provenance Blockchain)
Permissioned instance of Provenance Blockchain used for registering fund assets
from Apollo.
Axelar Permissioned instance of the Axelar blockchain (and related o-chain
infrastructure) used for cross-chain message passing and secure interoperability
between Onyx Digital Assets and Provenance Blockchain Zone.
LayerZero Cross-chain message passing protocol and secure interoperability services
(Oracles and Relayers) between Onyx Digital Assets and the permissioned
Avalanche subnet.
Oasis Pro Tokenization platform used for deploying Apollo fund tokens on Provenance
Blockchain. Oasis Pro implemented the ERC-20 token standard in ProvWasm using
Provenance Blockchain Markers and extended the standard to include the Mintable
and Burnable interfaces from the ODA-FACT token standard.
Biconomy Full-stack Account Abstraction solution that leverages ERC-4337. The
components used include the Smart Accounts Platform, Paymaster and Bundler.
The main use case in the POC was deploying a Paymaster to cover gas fees
incurred by the fund manager on the permissioned Avalanche subnet.
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Smart contracts and technology build overview
Technology components Deployment location Description
Investor Portfolio Smart
Contract
(Portfolio Smart Contract)
Onyx Digital Assets Records all of an investor’s cash and asset positions across multiple
fund investments within a specic portfolio, while linking to a target
model portfolio.
Model Registry Smart
Contract
Onyx Digital Assets Tracks inventory of all model portfolios and enables on-chain,
transparent linkages between the models and the portfolios that
subscribe to them.
Fund Token Smart
Contracts
(Fund Token Contract)
Onyx Digital Assets,
Provenance Blockchain
and Avalanche
Tracks fund unit ownership, handles activity such as subscriptions/
redemptions and controls the fund lifecycle. Only test funds were
used.
Leveraged the ODA-FACT token standard.
See: Expanded overview of proof-of-concept components: Onyx
Digital Assets Fungible Asset Contract (ODA-FACT) token
standard.
Deposit Token Contract Onyx Digital Assets Issues USD deposit liabilities and provides the book of record
(ledger), executing of deposit issuance, redemption and
transactions, and access controls. Only test deposit liabilities were
represented.
Rebalancing Module O-chain An o-chain service that computes trade orders to align the
investor’s portfolio to target model allocations.
Orchestrator Smart
Contract
(Orchestrator)
Onyx Digital Assets Receives orders from the Rebalancing Module, routes orders to
target chains for execution and coordinates settlement by linking
cash and asset legs.
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Overview of end-to-end on-chain portfolio rebalancing and order ow
With the infrastructure setup complete and on-chain and o-chain components in place, we executed an end-to-
end workow, inclusive of three rebalancing scenarios.
Step Description
Fund setup Fund managers (Apollo, WisdomTree and J.P. Morgan Private Bank) provided investment strategies,
opening them to investment.
Model and portfolio
creation
The PM created a series of investment models and set up discretionary portfolios to follow these
models for a number of investors.
Scenario 1: Initial investment The investor sourced cash and deposited it into the Portfolio Smart Contract, preparing for
investments to be made on their behalf.
Rebalancing The investor’s portfolio as represented by the Portfolio Smart Contract was 100% invested in cash,
requiring initial deployment. The Rebalancing Module automatically calculated the subscription orders
required to align the investor’s portfolio with the model.
Order routing and
submission
These orders were routed to Onyx Digital Assets and then across to Provenance Blockchain and
Avalanche through the interoperability infrastructure, Axelar and LayerZero; fund managers received
orders and could see that cash had been positioned for settlement on Onyx Digital Assets.
Order execution and
settlement
Subscription orders were approved, the fund managers issued fund units to the portfolio and
messages conrming settlement were sent back to Onyx Digital Assets.
Scenario 2: Cash infusion The investor deposited additional cash into their portfolio, causing the steps; rebalancing, order
routing and submission, and order execution and settlement to repeat, with dierent orders now
placed.
Scenario 3: Model change The PM updated the investment allocations for one of their models, which automatically rebalanced
all subscribed portfolios (repeating the steps; rebalancing, order routing and submission and order
execution and settlement).
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A comprehensive description of each step can be found below. To contextualize the workow, we have described the
steps from the perspective of the various ecosystem participants and included prototype samples from the illustrative
PM and investor portfolio construction and management application, Crescendo, that was designed for the POC.
Note: Asset Managers can deploy funds onto any settlement network (one or multiple) where they would like to make their funds available to investors
Hypothetical funds from Asset Managers are deployed on settlement networks and are not part of live product oerings. There is no guarantee that J.P. Morgan,
Apollo, or WisdomTree will develop or oer such solutions.
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Step Description
1 Portfolio Manager creates the model and deploys to the Model Registry Smart Contract on-chain
2 Portfolio Manager sets up discretionary portfolios to follow these models for a number of investors (there’s one Investor
Portfolio Smart Contract per investor)
3 Investor’s portfolio is linked to the selected model and the investor
4 Investor establishes cash balance on-chain through the Deposit Token Smart Contract
5 Investor transfers required Deposit Token amount to their Investor Portfolio Smart Contract, preparing for investment
6 The investor’s portfolio is 100% invested in cash, requiring rebalancing. Subscription orders required to align the investor’s
portfolio with the model are calculated by the Rebalancer Module – and routed to the Investor’s Portfolio Smart Contract
7 The orders are sent from the Investor Portfolio Smart Contract to the Orchestrator Smart Contract where the orders are
queued and routed to the relevant chains – with funds on Onyx Digital Assets, Provenance Blockchain, and Avalanche
8 For funds on Onyx Digital Assets, orders are received by the asset managers on Onyx Digital Assets (Apollo, J.P. Morgan
Private Bank, and WisdomTree) who can see that cash had been positioned for settlement on Onyx Digital Assets
8a For funds on Provenance Blockchain and Avalanche, orders are routed from Onyx Digital Assets to Provenance Blockchain
and Avalanche through the interoperability infrastructure, Axelar and LayerZero; asset managers (Apollo on Provenance,
WisdomTree on Avalanche) receive the orders and can see that cash had been positioned for settlement on Onyx Digital Assets
9 Orders are approved by the asset managers and fund units are issued to the relevant investors. On Avalanche, Biconomy's
Account Abstraction infrastructure is leveraged to cover gas fees incurred by the Asset Manager when approving orders
10 For funds on Onyx Digital Assets, messages conrming settlement are sent to the Orchestrator Smart Contract on Onyx
Digital Assets
10a For funds on Provenance Blockchain and Avalanche, messages conrming settlement are sent back to Onyx Digital Assets
from Provenance Blockchain and Avalanche through the interoperability infrastructure, Axelar and LayerZero - hitting the
Orchestrator Smart Contract on Onyx Digital Assets
11 The messages conrming settlement are sent from the Orchestrator Smart Contract to the Investor Portfolio Smart
Contract where record of the asset positions across multiple fund investments within a specic portfolio are held
12 Finally, once state of all orders in the Investor Portfolio Smart Contract are recorded as settled, Deposit Tokens are
transferred from the Investor Portfolio Smart Contract to the respective asset managers address on ODA
The end-to-end ow of Project Guardian shows the interaction of PM, investor, smart contracts, technology and infrastructure providers, and fund managers.
Note: Asset Managers can deploy funds onto any settlement network (one or multiple) where they would like to make their funds available to investors. There is no
guarantee that J.P. Morgan, Apollo, or WisdomTree will develop or oer such solutions.
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Fund managers provided investment vehicles, representing alternative investment, xed income and equity strategies
for tokenization onto their chosen blockchain (Onyx Digital Assets, Provenance Blockchain or Avalanche). Setting
up each of the funds resulted in deploying a Fund Token Contract, with the respective fund manager’s signature,
indicating the fund as authenticated and open for subscription.
The fund manager played the roles of both tokenization agent and token administrator, which are two role
types dened by the ODA-FACT token standard (see Expanded overview of proof-of-concept components:
Onyx Digital Assets Fungible Asset Contract (ODA-FACT) token standard section for further details). This
allowed the fund manager to retain control of all relevant functionality—primarily minting and burning fund units—
throughout the workow. In a live state, transfer agents or other entities designated by the fund manager would
likely play these roles.
Fund Setup
The PM created model portfolios by entering basic information, such as the name and the objective.
11
An entry was
created for each model in the on-chain Model Registry Smart Contract on Onyx Digital Assets, consisting of model
metadata and PM details.
Then, the PM selected specic funds and set percentage allocations to each—these constituted the model
portfolio’s strategy. Allocation detail was not stored on-chain.
A snapshot of the representative model that was used is shown below.
Model and portfolio creation
11
This step refers to the input of a model portfolio which is constructed outside of this framework using proprietary tools and research.
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12
Balanced ESG is a stylized, representative model portfolio used in this POC. A live discretionary portfolio would be more diversied than our illustrative model. The
underlying investment vehicles are provided for illustrative and discussion purposes only and are not necessarily investable.
Balanced ESG Model
12
Asset
class
Sub-asset
class
Investment
vehicle
Fund
manager
Settlement
network
Tokenization
provider
Allocation
%
Equities U.S. Large Cap J.P. Morgan Private
Bank Sustainable Equity
Strategy
J.P. Morgan
Private Bank
Onyx Digital
Assets
Onyx 35%
Equities European Large
Cap
J.P. Morgan Private Bank
European Sustainable
Equity Strategy
J.P. Morgan
Private Bank
Onyx Digital
Assets
Onyx 15%
Fixed Income Core Fixed Income WisdomTree 7-10 Year
Treasury Digital Fund
WisdomTree Avalanche Onyx 30%
Alternative
Investments
Private Equity Apollo — Private Equity
Fund
Apollo Provenance
Blockchain
Oasis Pro 10%
Alternative
Investments
Private Credit Apollo —Private Credit
Fund
Apollo Provenance
Blockchain
Oasis Pro 10%
The PM was also responsible for creating each investor’s discretionary portfolio(s). For each portfolio created,
a Portfolio Smart Contract was deployed onto Onyx Digital Assets, which specied investor and PM details and
linked the portfolio to the relevant model it intended to track.
In the POC workow, the Portfolio Smart Contract that the PM set up for the investor followed the Balanced-
ESG model, as shown above.
Additionally, the Portfolio Smart Contract contained position tracking functionality. This allowed the Portfolio
Smart Contract to capture all settlement activity conrmations, across all networks.
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On Crescendo, the PM can create new models by adding in specic model details such as the model name and model objective.
The Crescendo mobile application is the investor’s one-stop shop for viewing available investment models, connecting with
their PM, accessing resources and tracking their portfolio’s performance.
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The investor needed to establish a balance of cash on-chain to conduct the initial investment. The investor
requested this balance, and upon acceptance, deposit tokens were issued to the investor’s blockchain address on
Onyx Digital Assets. This action enabled the transfer of cash from o-chain to on-chain.
The Deposit Token Contract also implemented the ODA-FACT token standard (see: Expanded overview of proof-
of-concept components: Onyx Digital Assets Fungible Asset Contract (ODA-FACT) token standard). Note
that this method of implementing deposit tokens was chosen to promote fungibility and interoperability across the
environments of issuance and settlement.
The investor later deposited their on-chain cash to the Portfolio Smart Contract, signaling it was ready for
investment. This simultaneously emitted a deposit event onto the blockchain in the process.
Scenario 1 Initial investment
On Crescendo, the investor can easily allocate their chosen balance of Deposit Tokens to be invested into a selected model.
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This deposit event (from the Investor’s initial investment) triggered the PM’s Rebalancing Module for the initial
deployment of cash. The Rebalancing Module calculated required trades by rst comparing the existing
composition of the portfolio—which under Scenario 1 was 100% cash versus the target portfolio allocations,
and then determining the quantities of fractional fund shares to be purchased. To make this calculation, the
Rebalancing Module retrieved the latest net asset value information from an o-chain reference data service. In a
future state, a series of oracles could source this information.
All orders were automatically augmented with blockchain data, simultaneously submitted onto Onyx Digital Assets
and passed to the Orchestrator for onward relaying. The blockchain transactions containing the orders were signed
by the PM’s private key, given their discretion and control over investments in the portfolio. Each order contained
information about the asset, settlement location, amount, trade direction (buy/sell) and other necessary details.
Rebalancing
With just one click, the PM rebalances the investor’s portfolio to align with the selected model. Trade orders are sent to the relevant
blockchain networks for each specic fund, while – Deposit Tokens are moved on ODA from the investor to the relevant Fund Managers.
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The Orchestrator routed and processed each order sequentially and synchronously (i.e., Order #1 needed
conrmed settlement before Order #2 could be relayed and settled— and so on, until all orders for a given
portfolio had been completed). Project Guardian demonstrates an automated rebalancing solution for portfolios
consisting of open funds recorded on multiple distributed ledgers. This solution can be further scaled up to
support rebalancing of tens and thousands of such portfolios.
For each order, the Orchestrator submitted cash transfer instructions to the Deposit Token Contract on Onyx
Digital Assets. These instructions resulted in the movement of cash from the investor’s Portfolio Smart Contract
to an account in preparation for settlement. While in this account, neither the PM nor the investor could access or
move the funds, guaranteeing the settlement of the cash leg.
The Orchestrator also routed each order to:
Order routing and submission
A local router contract
for funds deployed on
Onyx Digital Assets
On Onyx Digital Assets, a local router contract sent the order to the Fund Token Contract. The fund
manager received and registered the order.
LayerZero endpoint
contracts for funds
deployed on Avalanche
Once LayerZero endpoint contracts on Onyx Digital Assets received the order and the transaction was
committed on Onyx Digital Assets, an event was emitted. O-chain LayerZero services—an oracle and
relayer—picked up the event as a message containing the order, signed it, and transmitted it directly to the
LayerZero endpoint contracts hosted on Avalanche. This LayerZero endpoint contract ingested the message
and validated it, enabling the order to be propagated to the relevant Fund Token Contract on Avalanche.
Axelar gateway contracts
for funds deployed on
Provenance Blockchain
Once Axelar gateway contracts on Onyx Digital Assets received the order, an event was emitted. An
o-chain relayer picked up the message containing the order and transmitted it to a private instance of
the Axelar blockchain for validation. Once the message had been validated, another o-chain relayer (the
executor) propagated the message to the relevant Fund Token Contract on the Provenance Blockchain.
See the Expanded overview of proof-of-concept components: Cross-chain interoperability section for more details.
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On all three chains, the order propagated to the Fund Token Contract eectively requested the fund manager to
“mint” or issue fund units to the portfolio. The request could be considered an on-chain recordation of the PM’s
order that would then automatically reconcile against the settlement when the fund manager later accepts the
request. This automated reconciliation and trade acceptance represents a step change over the current order
execution and settlement process in BAU infrastructure.
For the initial investment, all orders were subscription orders. However, as the rebalancing module outputs redemption
orders for other types of rebalancing events (e.g., Scenario 2—Cash infusion; Scenario 3—Model change), this
step results in a request for the fund manager to “burn” or redeem fund units from the portfolio as shown below.
Sequence diagram of the Project Guardian ow which showcases the interaction between the smart contracts,
interoperability solutions, account abstraction infrastructure, and blockchain networks.
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The fund manager received the request to “mint” fund units to the portfolio.
•
For assets held directly on Onyx Digital Assets, fund units were minted to (or burned from) the Portfolio
Smart Contract of the investor.
•
In the case of Avalanche and Provenance Blockchain, fund units would be minted to (or burned from)
blockchain addresses on each network,— specic and unique to each portfolio. The PM held the private
keys corresponding to these addresses.
On Onyx Digital Assets and Provenance Blockchain, the fund manager directly accepted the request—signing and
executing the acceptance transaction with a private key that corresponded to their externally owned account on-chain.
In contrast, on Avalanche, we leveraged Biconomy’s on-chain and o-chain ERC-4337 infrastructure to implement
Account Abstraction and abstract away the gas fees that the fund manager may typically incur on an Avalanche
subnet. Here, a Smart Contract Wallet was used for the fund manager, instead of an externally owned account.
See the Expanded overview of proof-of-concept components: Account Abstraction section for more details.
The fund manager’s acceptance of the request resulted in the issuance of fund units to the portfolio. This
constituted both order execution and settlement, compressed into one action. For greater eciencies, fund
managers could look to automate the acceptance functionality, provided an order meets a set of predetermined
rules. We tested this functionality when we executed the rebalancing activity over a larger series of portfolios
(see Scenario 3—Model change).
A settlement conrmation was passed back to the Orchestrator on Onyx Digital Assets through the same channel
(the local router on Onyx Digital Assets, Axelar or LayerZero) that originally routed the order. The Orchestrator then
sent the conrmation to the Portfolio Smart Contract, where it was logged. Simultaneously, the Orchestrator nalized
cash movements to the relevant fund manager’s blockchain address on Onyx Digital Assets, completing settlement.
Order execution and settlement
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We chose to test another rebalancing scenario by simulating an event that may cause a unique portfolio to deviate
from its model. A cash infusion is a common event that results in such deviation, which eectively dilutes the
allocation percentages of the portfolio’s investments.
In this step, the investor added cash to the portfolio. Upon receipt of the additional cash, the Rebalancing Module
automatically computed the new orders, repeating the steps; rebalancing, order routing and submission and order
execution and settlement. This resulted in the portfolio returning to alignment with its optimal state.
We believe this ow is extensible to changes in underlying fund valuations as well.
Scenario 2 Cash infusion
Lastly, to demonstrate the ease with which a PM could implement a discretionary change across an entire client
base, we tested the scenario where a PM replaces a fund in a particular model portfolio.
In this case, the PM replaced “Apollo – Private Equity Fund” with “Apollo – Equity Replacement Fund” in the
Balanced ESG model, necessitating a subscription and redemption across 100 distinct portfolios that were
mapped to this model. Upon making the change, the Rebalancing Module automatically kicked o rebalancing
across all portfolios, with all order routing, submission and settlement activity following immediately. Executing the
change to the model and the subsequent rebalancing activity did not require a single step of manual intervention.
This nal step—to us—encapsulated the essence of what we sought to achieve: the automatic rebalancing of a
large number of portfolios through a single change in a reference model. The successful completion of this aspect
of the POC represents a step change improvement compared to the current state whereby portfolio managers
and teams of operational professionals calculate, prepare, place, settle, reconcile and report on trades across their
client portfolios.
Scenario 3 Model change
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The PM can easily adjust any given model in Crescendo by removing funds, adding funds, or amending the allocations.
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Once the PM is happy with the model adjustments, the PM can seamlessly update all of the investor portfolios aligned to that specic
model. Crescendo sends the calculated sell orders to the relevant blockchain networks for settlement, upon conrmation of settlement
and movement of Deposit Tokens on Onyx Digital Assets, the buy orders are sent to the appropriate blockchain networks for settlement.
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Expanded overview of proof-of-concept components
The following section provides an in-depth look at the key blockchain-specic technologies and new infrastructure
tested in this POC:
•
Cross-chain interoperability: required to transmit messages containing nancial transactions across
networks in a secure manner
•
Onyx Digital Assets Fungible Asset Contract (ODA-FACT) token standard: extends the ERC-20
standard, promotes the portability of assets across a single blockchain network, and introduces control
requirements necessary for nancial products
•
Account Abstraction: a means of simplifying the user experience for users interacting with blockchain
networks, specically the process of covering gas fees and implementing programmability
Cross-chain interoperability
As blockchain ecosystems proliferate, cross-chain interoperability becomes ever more critical. For Layer 1
blockchains, we see two main approaches to achieve cross-chain interoperability:
Asset transformation: Also known as asset bridging, in this approach an asset moves from one blockchain to
another. Two methods for achieving this are as follows:
•
Wrapped assets — assets are locked on the source chain and minted (created) as wrapped assets on
the destination chain.
•
Native assets — assets are burned on the source chain and minted (created) as native, non-wrapped
assets on the destination chain.
Cross-chain messaging: Assets remain on the source chain and messages are sent between the source and
a destination chain. Messages may include data containing instructions for execution on destination chains,
conrmation of transfers or business data.
We believe cross-chain messaging likely has several advantages over asset transformation:
Single source of truth Asset transformation could create ambiguity about the denitive source of truth for a given bridged asset.
In addition, investors may view an asset which exists on one chain dierently from its wrapped equivalent
on a dierent blockchain. Cross-chain messaging, in contrast, ensures assets remain on their source
chain, avoiding duplication of assets across ledgers.
Flexibility Cross-chain messaging enables user-dened messages to be sent between chains, potentially providing
utility beyond instructing movement of assets. For example, messages could be sent which conrm asset
movement on a destination chain, transmit business data maintained on a dierent blockchain (e.g., a client’s
KYC status) or leverage the benets of Account Abstraction.
Reduced risk of asset
theft
There are numerous examples in public blockchain ecosystems where the asset transformation approach
has enabled malicious actors to gain access to private keys and steal user’s tokens. A successful malicious
event with cross-chain messaging, however, could have a lower impact since an attacker’s actions could
be restricted to simply sending invalid messages or denying access to the service, as opposed to obtaining
unauthorized access to user’s assets. This proposed benet would depend on careful design and require
rigorous testing and robust security audits to validate.
1.
2.
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The following requirements were established to assess dierent cross-chain messaging solutions for the POC:
•
Low integration overhead: Solutions should not require onerous integration eort nor signicant application
re-write but should have high potential for reuse.
•
Breadth of supported chains: Solutions should support a high number and type of blockchains (i.e., multiple
EVM and non-EVM chains).
•
Scalability: Solutions should minimize the number of required connections between systems. Connectivity at
a blockchain-to-blockchain level was seen as the most scalable approach.
•
Decentralization: Interoperability solutions should allow for the decentralization of both technical
infrastructure and governance mechanisms.
–
Decentralized infrastructure provides more exibility for developers and operators to select their
preferred setup.
–
Decentralized governance could take the form of distributed validators checking each other’s behavior
or an aggregate conguration of dierent organizations, individually verifying messages.
•
Security: In addition to decentralized architectures providing an element of security, other important
features for the project were customizable security congurations, prevention of malicious actions and
appropriate audit trails.
Consistent with the criteria above, instances of Axelar and LayerZero were implemented for exploration in the POC.
Implementation in the proof-of-concept
To enable cross-chain messaging, Axelar deployed smart contracts (known as gateways) on Onyx Digital Assets
and the Provenance Blockchain. LayerZero achieved connectivity by deploying smart contracts (known as
endpoints) on Onyx Digital Assets and the permissioned Avalanche subnet. Gateways and endpoints are deployed
at the blockchain layer, providing sucient scalability. Both Axelar and LayerZero modied their typical interchain
setup to meet the POC’s requirements for privacy and access management.
As Axelar and LayerZero are well-documented open systems, this report focuses on our POC's high-level ows and
customizations.
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Axelar
Axelar is a decentralized blockchain that acts as a hub, in a hub and spoke network of blockchains. In addition to
supporting Cosmos-based blockchains, the Axelar blockchain validates messages using proof-of-stake consensus by
public permissionless nodes. O-chain relayers deliver messages between the Axelar blockchain and destination chains.
For this POC, Axelar deployed and operated a private permissioned Axelar testnet (for message validation) and
private o-chain relayers (for message passing).
The process ow of the Axelar interoperability solution including on-chain smart contracts and o-chain infrastructure,
facilitating message transfer between ODA and Provenance Blockchain.
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Workow
The Orchestrator sends a message to the Axelar gateway contract on the source chain.
a. During order routing, the source chain was Onyx Digital Assets, and the message contained the order.
b. During settlement, the source chain was Provenance Blockchain, and the message contained the asset-
leg settlement conrmation. This activity emitted an event.
An o-chain relayer listened for this event, and then delivered the message to the Axelar blockchain.
Validators on the Axelar chain conrmed the validity of the message.
Another o-chain service, known as an executor, on the destination chain picked up the message that had
been validated by Axelar.
The executor checked the validated message for destination details, and nally delivered the message to the
destination chain’s Axelar gateway contract. During order routing, the destination chain was Provenance, and
during settlement, the destination chain was Onyx Digital Assets.
The message was transmitted to the relevant contract, the Fund Token Contract, during order routing and
the Portfolio Smart Contract during settlement.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
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LayerZero uses oracles and relayers chosen by application developers to validate and pass messages between
chains. A decentralized set of entities can congure and/or operate dedicated o-chain relayer and oracle
instances for routine interoperability across their permissioned blockchains, allowing controlled messaging while
avoiding centralization.
For this POC, LayerZero provided private permissioned relayers and oracles to listen for events, coordinate
message passing and provide signatures.
LayerZero
The process ow of the LayerZero interoperability solution including on-chain smart contracts and o-chain
infrastructure facilitating message transfer between ODA and Avalanche.
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Workow
The Orchestrator sends a message to the LayerZero 'user application' contract on the source chain.
a. During order routing, the source chain was Onyx Digital Assets, and the message contained the order.
b. During settlement, the source chain was Avalanche, and the message contained the asset-leg settlement
conrmation.
The source chain LayerZero user application contract translated the message into a 'sendMsg' function and
delivered it to the LayerZero endpoint contract. This activity emitted an event.
Both the oracle and relayer listened for events emitted by the LayerZero endpoint, and upon receipt, picked
up the message.
The oracle signed and transmitted the transaction hash to the LayerZero endpoint contract on Avalanche,
emitting an event back to the relayer.
Upon receiving the emitted event that the transaction hash has been received by the LayerZero endpoint
contract on Avalanche, the relayer signed and transmitted the transaction message to the destination chain
LayerZero endpoint.
The destination chain LayerZero endpoint validated the message by comparing the transaction hash against
the transaction and ensured that user application conguration on the receiving (destination) contract
matched that of the sending (source) contract. If successful, the message was committed on Avalanche, the
destination chain.
The destination chain LayerZero endpoint submitted the message to the destination chain user application
contract.
The destination chain user application contract executed the message, completing the interoperability workow.
1.
2.
3.
4.
6.
7.
8.
5.
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Onyx Digital Assets Fungible Asset Contract (ODA-FACT) token standard
Token standards provide a blueprint for the creation of, the operation of, and the interactions with tokens on a
blockchain. By aligning to a standard, tokens gain interoperability and a consistent experience, while developers and
users benet from familiarity across applications.
As various tokenized assets are onboarded to Onyx Digital Assets, token standardization enables building shared
services and interoperability across the platform. Permissioned roles can consistently perform actions like minting
and burning, and assets can be ported across diverse applications.
To that end, the ODA-FACT token standard was developed by Onyx to provide a consistent way of representing
fungible nancial assets on the Onyx Digital Assets blockchain. This Onyx Digital Assets standard is ERC-
20 compliant for simplicity and interoperability, but extends ERC-20 to address additional requirements like
standardized minting, burning and enhanced controls. The ODA-FACT token standard was also implemented for
the cash leg (deposit tokens) of the transactions to maintain fungibility.
ERC-20 compliance in the ODA-FACT token standard ensures:
•
Simplicity and developer-friendly usability
•
Easy deployment of ERC-20 applications from other chains
•
Interoperability with existing ERC-20 tokens
However, ERC-20 alone lacks certain features that we have needed across dierent projects involving traditional
assets, leading us to extend the standard to include functions suitable for transactions with regulated nancial
instruments.
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Key features of the Onyx Digital Assets FACT include:
Visual representation of the Onyx Digital Assets Fungible Asset Contract (ODA-FACT) token standard showcasing how
it expands upon the ERC-20 token standard.
Key features of the ODA-FACT token standard include:
Feature Description
Managed token Allows permissioned deactivation and reactivation of Tokens. Needed for sanctions or admin actions — for
instance, token administrators may wish to temporarily cease all activity with tokens that represent sanctioned
assets.
Managed account Allows permissioned locking of balances and disallowing of accounts. Important for security measures — for
instance, token administrators may wish to prevent certain entities from further transacting with their tokens.
Allows permissioned locking of balances and force transfer/burn of locked balances within a specic account.
Useful for Account Administrators in the event of a default scenario.
Mintable Requires authorized mint requests before increasing token supply to an account, also reducing reconciliation.
Provides an audit trail of all requests and corresponding actions (acceptance or rejection) for a Tokenization
Agent and a requesting party.
Burnable Requires authorized burn requests before decreasing token supply from an account. Provides an audit trail of all
requests and corresponding actions (acceptance or rejection) for a Tokenization Agent and a requesting party.
Token metadata Allows setting metadata like a URI to link o-chain instrument data.
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Implementation in the proof-of-concept
•
The Fund Token Contracts and the Deposit Token Contract implemented ODA-FACT on the EVM chains.
The use of the standard ensured fungibility of the cash and asset leg in a streamlined fashion. Deposit
Token standards may vary from the ODA-FACT token standard when issued at scale based on the specic
characteristics of cash that dier from assets.
•
For the non-EVM chain, Provenance Blockchain, Oasis Pro deployed the fund tokens in ProvWasm using
Provenance Blockchain Markers and extended the tokens to include the Mintable and Burnable interfaces
of the ODA-FACT in order to interact with the system.
•
For the deposit tokens, the request and acceptance ows from the Mintable and Burnable feature set
of the ODA-FACT token standard were used to facilitate deposit token issuance and redemption. This
represented the movement of cash from legacy demand deposit accounts to on-chain blockchain addresses.
The standard ERC-20 transfer functionality was also utilized in all settlement activity.
•
For the Fund Token Contracts, the request and acceptance ows from the Mintable and Burnable feature
sets of the ODA-FACT token standard were used to facilitate investment processing. The fund manager
minted or burned units based on authorized requests, representing how share issuance and redemption take
place in response to the receipt of valid subscription and redemption orders.
•
Fund managers assumed the role of tokenization agent and token administrator for the Fund Token
Contracts; albeit many of the associated functions are typically played by transfer agents.
Account Abstraction
ERC-4337
13
/ Account Abstraction is a framework for smart contract wallets (‘SCW’) that broadly improves the
experience users have when interacting with EVM chains. It was designed with exible validation and execution
logic at its core and is projected to become the de facto account standard.
Prior to Account Abstraction, externally owned accounts (EOAs) on EVM chains were inexible. The programmability
that Account Abstraction aords allows for on-chain accounts to inherently have the following capabilities:
•
Account recovery: users can recover access to their account without seed phrases if private keys are lost
by dening custom logic, such as social recovery.
•
Transaction guardrails: scenario-based rules can trigger dierent transaction signing requirements, like
multi-signature for certain transaction amounts or asset types.
•
Gas fee abstraction: “Paymaster” functionality can allow for gas to be paid in dierent tokens or on behalf
of users to simplify gas fee management and encourage usage.
•
Transaction batching (Multicall): multiple transactions can be combined into a single batch that only
requires one signature. This removes the need to sign multiple individual transactions, saving time and
reducing transaction costs.
•
Session keys: users can give trusted dApps permission to automatically sign transactions for a specic
period, preventing multiple signature requests within the allocated time window.
13
https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4337
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Implementation in the proof-of-concept
For the POC, we focused on gas fee abstraction enabled by Paymaster functionality. Avalanche permissioned subnets
require gas tokens for transactions, which also applied to the POC, although only test gas tokens were utilized.
This resulted in the fund manager needing sucient gas fee balances to cover transaction costs. Many nancial
institutions are uncomfortable with the process of acquiring or holding gas tokens, and therefore exploring the gas
abstraction functionality of ERC-4337 was pertinent.
We leveraged Biconomy’s Paymaster infrastructure to abstract away gas fees for the fund manager. The following
diagram details the workow for a transaction sent by the fund manager from their smart contract wallet.
BiconomySDK Account Abstraction
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BiconomySDK Account Abstraction Flow
Step Description
1 Leveraging the BiconomySDK, the fund manager creates a ‘UserOperation’ containing their transaction intent which is
sent to the o-chain Paymaster service
2 The o-chain Paymaster Service veries eligibility for sponsorship, returns the ‘paymasterAndData’ eld and signs the
‘UserOperation’ which is returned to the Fund Manager
3 The Fund Manager then signs the 'UserOperation' and the BiconomySDK sends it to the o-chain Bundler
4 The Bundler then converts the ‘UserOperation’ to a ‘handleOps’ transaction and submits it to the EntryPoint Contract
5 The EntryPoint Contract performs validation as per the verication and authentication dened by the Fund Managers
Smart Contract Wallet
6 The EntryPoint contract then performs validation on the paymaster specied in the userOp. If paymaster passes
verication & agrees to pay the gas, then it deposits the amount on EntryPoint
7 The EntryPoint Contract calls the execution method on the Smart Contract Wallet to begin execution of the userOp
8 The EntryPoint Contract refunds the Bundler by transferring the relevant gas amount from the paymaster’s deposit
Diagram illustrating the on-chain and o-chain components of Biconomy’s Account Abstraction infrastructure which enabled the abstraction of gas fees for the Fund
Manager on Avalanche.
By leveraging a smart contract wallet, we were able to provide a seamless way for the fund manager to deploy Fund
Token Contracts and accept minting and burning requests without the need to obtain gas tokens to cover the
required transaction fees.
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This POC was an ambitious eort to take the rst steps towards our vision of creating a step change in the asset
and wealth management industry through a new paradigm for portfolio management.
As we have outlined in this report, we sought to answer the following key questions within the POC:
•
How can we improve the eciency and scalability of order execution and settlement across multiple asset
classes and ownership registries?
•
How can we enable the inclusion of alternative investments in discretionary portfolios, given their
operational diculties and limited liquidity compared to traditional public assets?
•
How can we overcome the fragmentation and interoperability challenges posed by multiple ownership
registries developed on dierent technology protocols?
•
How can we simplify the use of multi-party, multi-asset shared ledgers through the abstraction of technical
complexities unique to blockchain technology use?
Potential Benets
The POC yielded several learnings that validated potential benets for the major actors involved in delivering
discretionary portfolios, inclusive of alternative investments, to wealthy individuals.
•
Wealth managers: a wealth management rm with 100,000 client portfolios could collapse their monthly
rebalancing process from more than 3,000 operational steps into a few clicks.
•
Investors: eliminating cash drag through programmatic rebalancing and near-instant settlement could
reduce costs by almost 20%.
14
•
Asset managers, wealth managers and distributors: could potentially capture a $400 billion annual new
revenue opportunity through broader distribution of alternative investments to High Net Worth Individuals.
•
Service providers (fund administrators, transfer agents etc.): leveraging automation and digitization,
could lead to increased eciency, cost reduction, enhanced transparency, and reduced risk.
These and other benets are expanded on below.
Potential benets and considerations
Key learnings
14
Using 1.09% average discretionary portfolio management fee from the Cerulli Report U.S. Managed Accounts 2023 Decisions About Discretion as of Q4 2022
and assuming 24bps of cash drag.
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Eciency and scalability
By deploying smart contracts representing discretionary portfolios, we successfully showed how tens of thousands
of portfolios could be programmatically linked to representative models and automatically rebalanced en-masse
when changes to those models occurred—even if these models include alternative investments. This solution could
give wealth managers a “one-click” experience that aligns their investor base seamlessly, automatically updating
investment strategies and reducing the operational back-oce processing for distributing and settling associated
orders. Assuming a wealth management rm has 100,000 client portfolios rebalanced monthly, this solution has the
potential to collapse more than 3,000 operational steps into a few clicks.
Further, utilizing blockchain’s ability to enable near-instant settlement, clients could remain fully invested thereby
limiting cash drag, resulting in a savings of ~24bps per annum (assuming ~3% cash and a long-term return of 8%
over cash).
Inclusion of alternative investments in discretionary portfolios
Tokenization of private alts funds represents a $400 billion annual revenue opportunity for alts fund managers
and distributors.
15
As stated previously, the primary driving factors that prevent alternative investments from
being included in model portfolios are their lack of liquidity and the cumbersome investment process. While liquidity
challenges cannot be solved in a POC (see Practical considerations and challenges section below for proposals
on how these could be addressed), we demonstrated how leveraging blockchain technology and tokenization could
address the operational challenges. By representing traditional and alternative investments as tokenized funds,
the funding, order execution and settlement processes for both asset classes can be standardized and automated.
This standardization could simplify how investments in alternatives are processed by replacing manual subscription
processing with automated, straight-through processes that leverage smart contracts for payments and investor
register updates. Pairing this new technological approach with dierent liquidity solutions could enable wealth
managers to condently include alternatives in discretionary and model portfolios, oering higher quality portfolios
to their clients.
Broadening the investable universe with ledger interoperability
There are numerous ndings to highlight on this front:
•
Despite the growing number of blockchains vying for fund manager attention, and the increasing deployment
of tokenized funds across various networks by fund managers, wealth managers can be entirely agnostic and
impartial to the evolving landscape. This is thanks to a variety of interoperability solutions and the possiblity
to establish a portfolio management capability allowing portfolios to be managed from a centralized place.
By extension, this would mean that fund managers could be equally agnostic to the plethora of blockchains,
provided their distributors’ systems were suitably connected across this landscape.
•
Wealth managers can automatically deploy, manage and monitor cohesive strategies consisting of tokenized
assets without moving the underlying assets from their ledger of record when their systems leverage
interoperability solutions that are scalable, well-connected and simple to implement.
•
By enabling fund managers, PMs and investors, who may all operate on dierent networks, to connect to
one another using these interoperability solutions seamlessly, the market size and liquidity of assets could
be broadened.
15
Source: Expected revenue opportunity estimates are based on projections from Bain and Onyx by J.P. Morgan’s market research.
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Improving the blockchain user experience
By leveraging novel Account Abstraction concepts such as a Biconomy’s Paymaster service, we could abstract
away the complexities of interacting with blockchains from the fund manager, who could seamlessly approve
investment orders without needing to rst obtain or hold cryptocurrency to pay for blockchain transaction fees.
This experience is much closer to today’s process, can easily be expanded to many blockchain networks, and can
reduce the overhead and risk associated with managing blockchain private keys, and purchasing and protecting
tokens required for transaction fees.
Further, the implementation of interoperability solutions, as described above, abstracted away the need for a
PM to concern herself with accessing assets across disparate blockchains or to manage blockchain private keys
associated with those dierent chains.
Practical considerations and challenges
Investment universe
The universe of tokenized investments must hit critical mass i.e., with respect to how many assets under
management a wealth manager could deploy, the breadth of tokenized oerings available by asset class and a
coalescing around operating models. While there continues to be many announcements in this space, the reality is
that today you cannot build a robust portfolio of tokenized investments. The total inventory of tokenized real-world
investments is approximately $1.3 billion
16
and is almost entirely composed of tokenized U.S. treasuries and private
loans. It will take time for a respectable marketplace of tokenized investments to emerge, but there is demand from
both fund managers and investors to further tokenize investments.
Liquidity
In our POC, we used subscriptions and redemptions placed directly with the fund managers as the mechanism
by which investors entered or exited investment vehicles. To make this real, we would need to extend this work to
consider purchases and sales on secondary markets so we could consider the full range of options to enter and
exit positions. Similarly, we believe there is merit in exploring how alternative investment funds with capital calls
could be included in this context.
As mentioned earlier, alternative investment funds require additional liquidity considerations, given they are generally
less liquid than traditional investments. While tokenization has the potential to enhance liquidity by creating a
more ecient secondary transaction process, this technology does not, in and of itself, create liquidity. We think a
potential future state would allow for a stack of liquidity solutions that could give wealth managers enough comfort
to include alternatives in their discretionary model portfolios.
16
https://app.rwa.xyz/ as of October 6, 2023
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This stack could consist of the following options:
•
Direct redemption instructions placed with the fund manager following their stated redemption terms (e.g.,
quarterly redemption with 90 day's notice)
•
A transfer of the investment at net asset value to another client within the distributor’s client base
•
Liquidity netting within or across distributors
17
•
Secondary sale of the holding to another investor
•
Secondary sale of the holding to a designated market maker onboarded to the platform
•
A liquidity tail guarantee program whereby the fund manager guarantees that an investor will receive
redemption proceeds within a stated time frame (e.g., 18 months from the rst eective redemption date)
Fund Structure
As more fund oerings are tokenized, fund managers may further explore innovative structures like Singapore-
based VCCs, which were established in 2020 and have the built-in exibility to invest across underlying asset types
and operate as either open-end (subscription/redemption) or closed-end (capital call/distribution) vehicles. This
exibility could make VCCs the preferred tokenized fund structure as more assets come on-chain. VCCs could also
be used for investors with particular tax needs or who prefer the simplicity of a single line item.
Regarding the ability to accommodate open- and closed-end vehicles, we believe there is a signicant opportunity
to deliver a better experience in traditional capital call-style investment vehicles. We believe tokenization could play
a signicant role in automating the capital call process and limiting cash drag by allowing investors to place funds in
temporary investments like liquid model portfolios or yielding assets like money market funds.
Blockchain-based records
To bring this initiative to life, dierent blockchain networks should serve as either the ocial books and records of
investor ownership or must be closely aligned and automatically synced with record keeping systems. We would also
further consider how to create value and eciency by bringing concepts like AML/KYC, investor accreditation
and suitability on-chain to help drive appropriate investment selection. This would require meaningful integration
work by fund managers, wealth managers and fund administrators. The global regulatory landscape on this topic
also continues to evolve across jurisdictions. In the U.S. there is ambiguity around the use of blockchain ledgers
as the primary source for ownership records of registered funds. In contrast, some countries such as Germany,
Luxembourg and Singapore have passed legislations to enable blockchain-based record keeping.
17
Liquidity netting refers to providing liquidity to investors seeking to exit from new investors into a fund. We designed what this could look like in our POC but did not
incorporate given time constraints. In summary, this concept can be automated using smart contracts to provide another liquidity avenue for alternatives investors by
connecting multiple distributors via a Rebalancing Module.
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Implementation and education
This POC explores an audacious change to how model portfolios are delivered to end investors. To gain adoption,
the benets to wealth managers, fund managers, fund administrators and investors must be compelling enough for
rms to make the necessary investments to implement this solution. Additionally, education will be key for potential
entrants into this space, as there are many misconceptions about blockchain technology and tokenization.
Privacy
Due to the transparent nature of blockchain technology, deploying all of the model details on-chain would risk
exposing the wealth management rm's intellectual property publicly. As a result, in our proof-of-concept, we
deployed the model and limited data on-chain, with the remaining information stored o-chain as reference data
(i.e., fund manager, fund ID, blockchain, and % allocation were all o-chain). Further investigation around the
balance between transparency and privacy would be required in a live state.
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We invite like-minded market participants to join us in further advancing this vision.
Consistent with the goals of Project Guardian, we believe our POC is a critical moment at the intersection
between traditional nance and blockchain technology. As discussed in the Practical considerations and challenges
section, there are several hurdles to overcome; however, none seem insurmountable. We view our contribution to
Project Guardian as the rst step of a journey into the complex business of delivering higher quality discretionary
investment portfolios in a thoughtful and ecient manner to improve the end investor’s experience and results.
We plan on continuing our journey to realize this vision and welcome curious wealth managers, asset managers,
technologists, and legal, regulatory and compliance professionals to reach out to discuss further. We invite market
participants to help further advance this vision for the industry through constructive discussion and debate,
product development, technology advancement, market structure and behavior change.
We believe a robust network of marketplace participants has the best chance of solving these key pain points and
identifying additional barriers to overcome. Join us as we work towards the future of wealth management.
The future of wealth management combines public and
private assets eciently to deliver better portfolios
Industry call to action
56 | PROJECT GUARDIAN
Onyx by J.P. Morgan
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