JP Morgan’s move to Ethereum proves Wall Street is quietly hijacking the digital dollar from crypto natives

JP Morgan Chase & Co. has formally entered the contest for on-chain cash, and the prize is not just a new product line. It is the billions of dollars in institutional capital that now sit in zero-yield stablecoins and early tokenized funds.

On Dec. 15, the $4 trillion banking giant launched the My OnChain Net Yield Fund (MONY) on the Ethereum blockchain, in its attempt to pull back liquidity into a structure it controls and regulators recognize.

MONY wraps a traditional money-market fund in a token that can live on public rails, pairing the speed of crypto with the one feature payment stablecoins such as Tether and Circle cannot legally offer under new US rules: yield.

That makes MONY less a DeFi experiment than JP Morgan’s attempt to redefine what “cash on-chain” means for large, KYC’d pools of capital.

It also puts the bank in more direct competition with BlackRock’s BUIDL and the broader tokenized Treasuries sector, which has grown into a mid–tens of billions market as institutions look for yield-bearing, blockchain-native cash equivalents.

How GENIUS tilts the field

To understand the timing, one has to start with the GENIUS Act, the US stablecoin law passed earlier this year.

The statute created a full licensing regime for payment stablecoins and, crucially, banned issuers from paying interest to token holders simply for holding the token.

As a result, the core business model for regulated dollar stablecoins is now codified: issuers hold reserves in safe assets, collect the yield, and pass none of it through directly.

For corporate treasurers and crypto funds that hold large stablecoin balances for weeks or months, that embeds a structural opportunity cost. In a world where front-end rates hover in the mid-single digits, that “stablecoin tax” can run at roughly 4–5% per year on idle balances.

MONY is designed to sit outside that perimeter. It is structured as a Rule 506(c) private placement money-market fund, not a payment stablecoin.

That means it is treated as a security, sold only to accredited investors, and invested in US Treasuries and fully collateralized Treasury repos.

As a money fund, it is structured to pass most of the underlying income back to shareholders after fees, not to trap the entire yield at the issuer level.

Crypto research firm Asva Capital noted:

By letting qualified investors subscribe and redeem in either cash or USDC via JP Morgan’s Morgan Money platform, MONY effectively creates a two-step workflow.

This allows the investors to use USDC or other payment tokens for transactions, then rotate into MONY when the priority shifts to holding and earning.

For JP Morgan, this is not a side bet. The bank seeded MONY with around $100 million of its own capital and is marketing it directly into its global liquidity client base.

As John Donohue, head of Global Liquidity at JP Morgan Asset Management, put it, the firm expects other global systemically important banks to follow.

So, the message is that tokenization has progressed past pilots; it is now a delivery mechanism for core cash products.

The collateral contest

The economic logic becomes clearer when you look at collateral, not wallets.

Crypto derivatives markets, prime brokerage platforms and OTC desks require margin and collateral around the clock.

Historically, stablecoins like USDT and USDC have been the default because they are fast and broadly accepted. They are not, however, capital efficient in a high-rate regime.

Tokenized money funds are built to fill that gap. Instead of parking $100 million in stablecoins that earn nothing, a fund or trading desk can hold $100 million of MMF tokens that track a conservative portfolio of short-term government assets and still move at blockchain speed between vetted venues.

BlackRock’s BUIDL product has already shown how that can evolve. Once it gained acceptance as collateral on large exchanges’ institutional rails, it stopped being “tokenization as demo” and became part of the funding stack.

MONY is aimed at the same corridor, but with a different perimeter.

While BUIDL has pushed aggressively into crypto-native platforms through partnerships with tokenization specialists, JP Morgan is tying MONY tightly to its own Kinexys Digital Assets stack and the existing Morgan Money distribution network.

So, the pitch for MONY is not to the offshore, high-frequency trading crowd. It is to pensions, insurers, asset managers and corporates that already use money-market funds and JP Morgan’s liquidity platforms today.

Donohue has argued that tokenization can “fundamentally change the speed and efficiency of transactions.” In practical terms, that means shrinking settlement windows for collateral moves from T+1 into intraday, and doing it without moving out of the banking and fund-regulation perimeter.

Moreover, the risk for stablecoins is not that they disappear. It is that a meaningful slice of the large, institutional balances that currently sit in USDC or USDT for collateral and treasury purposes migrate into tokenized MMFs instead, leaving stablecoins more concentrated in payments and open DeFi.

The Ethereum signal

Perhaps the clearest signal in MONY’s design is the choice of Ethereum as its base chain.

JP Morgan has run private ledgers and permissioned networks for years; putting a flagship cash product on a public blockchain is an acknowledgment that liquidity, tooling and counterparties have converged there.

Thomas Lee of BitMine views the move as a watershed moment, stating simply that “Ethereum is the future of finance.” This is a claim now supported by the fact that the world’s largest bank is deploying its flagship tokenized cash product on the network.

However, the “public” blockchain launch here comes with an asterisk. MONY is still a 506(c) security.

This means that its tokens can only sit in allowlisted, KYC’d wallets, and transfers are controlled to comply with securities law and the fund’s own restrictions. That effectively splits on-chain dollar instruments into two overlapping layers.

On the permissionless layer, retail users, high-frequency traders and DeFi protocols will continue to rely on Tether, USDC and similar tokens. Their value proposition is censorship resistance, universal composability and ubiquity across protocols and chains.

On the permissioned layer, MONY and peer funds like BUIDL and Goldman’s and BNY Mellon’s tokenized MMFs offer regulated, yield-bearing cash equivalents to institutions that care more about audit trails, governance and counterparty risk than about permissionless composability. Their liquidity is thinner but more curated; their use cases are narrower but higher-value per dollar.

Considering this, JP Morgan is betting that the next meaningful wave of on-chain volume will come from that second group: treasurers who want Ethereum’s speed and integration without taking on the regulatory ambiguity that still surrounds a large part of DeFi.

A defensive pivot

Ultimately, MONY looks less like a revolution against the existing system and more like a defensive pivot inside it.

For a decade, fintech and crypto firms chipped away at banks’ payment, FX and custody businesses. Stablecoins then went after the most fundamental layer: deposits and cash management, offering a digital bearer-like alternative that could sit outside bank balance sheets entirely.

By launching a tokenized money-market fund on public rails, JP Morgan is trying to pull some of that migration back inside its own perimeter, even if it means cannibalizing parts of its traditional deposit base.

George Gatch, CEO of J.P. Morgan Asset Management, has emphasized “active management and innovation” as the core of the offering, implicitly contrasting it with the passive float-skimming model of stablecoin issuers.

Meanwhile, bank is not alone. BlackRock, Goldman Sachs and BNY Mellon have already moved into tokenized MMFs and tokenized cash-equivalent products.

So, JP Morgan’s entry shifts that trend from early experimentation to open competition among incumbents over who will own institutional “digital dollars” on public chains.

If that competition succeeds, the effect will not be the end of stablecoins or the triumph of DeFi.

Instead, it would be a quiet re-bundling as the settlement rails will be public, and the instruments running on them will look a lot like traditional money-market funds.

However, the institutions earning a spread on the world’s cash will, once again, be the same Wall Street names that dominated the pre-tokenization era.

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