Making sense of blockchain on Wall Street

This information was first published on August 6, 2026, in the Finance section of Issue 02 of babsNYC.news.

by Kala Philo, Founder and Senior Editor, BabsNYC.news
(updated October 7, 2026)

Wall Street and big banks are rolling out an alphabet soup of specialized on-chain products and blockchains. It’s a challenge even for Wall Street insiders to keep up with.

Let’s start with a simplified look at two large financial institutions almost everyone knows, BlackRock and J.P. Morgan. The information below doesn’t cover all of their activity to date, of course. Instead, it goes over the basics of why they got into blockchain in the first place.

BlackRock is a (ginormous) asset manager that uses blockchain to innovate on investment products, while J.P. Morgan is a bank that uses it to innovate on payments and settlement.

BlackRock uses public blockchains to expand its investment offerings. Its IBIT ETF holds Bitcoin, giving investors exposure through regular brokerage accounts, while BUIDL puts shares of a fund investing in cash, Treasury bills, and repurchase agreements on public blockchains for qualified investors

J.P. Morgan, the biggest US bank, uses both private and public blockchains to give corporates, banks, and institutional treasuries faster, more programmable ways to move and settle money within banking compliance requirements. JPM's Kinexys Digital Payments runs on a private network restricted to approved participants, while its JPM Coin deposit token operates on the public Base blockchain, with participation restricted to approved institutional clients.

BlackRock is the world's largest asset manager, with $15.3T in assets under management (AUM) as of June 30, 2026. 

In January 2024, the SEC, then headed by the notoriously anti-crypto Gary Gensler, approved BlackRock's IBIT (iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF), a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) traded on the NASDAQ, and ten competing funds. The broader markets hardly blinked, but that was the moment that pushed Bitcoin into the TradFi mainstream.

At the top level, BlackRock serves accredited and institutional investors (pensions, endowments, corporates), financial advisors, and everyday retail investors who access its iShares ETFs through regular brokerages.

Those interested in Bitcoin care about regulated, liquid exposure to Bitcoin via a brokerage account, without a crypto wallet or private keys. They also know Bitcoin can be volatile, so they want products that keep that volatility in a defined slice of the portfolio and reduce operational and custody risk.

By contrast, some clients aren’t chasing Bitcoin at all. They want dollar-denominated yield from cash and Treasury-related investments, with features such as near-real-time on-chain transfers and 24/7 transferability between approved investors.

BlackRock cares about capturing new asset flows in an emerging category and defending the lead it already holds in the ETF business. They also care about positioning at the center of tokenized cash and money markets, showing that big, boring cash products can live on‑chain at scale.

BlackRock’s IBIT is a spot Bitcoin ETF. The fund directly holds bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain, with an institutional custodian, while investors own ETF shares that track BTC’s price. Investors don’t own the underlying BTC directly; they get economic exposure through those shares.

In March 2024, BlackRock launched BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL), a tokenized fund on a public blockchain. BUIDL is a flagship Real World Asset (RWA) product: shares in a traditional fund exist as tokens on public blockchains, giving qualified institutional investors on‑chain access to Treasury yields with faster settlement, 24/7 transferability between approved wallets, and programmability.

J.P. Morgan is the largest bank in the U.S. and the world’s most valuable bank by market cap. CEO Jamie Dimon has spent years deriding Bitcoin and “crypto tokens,” even as J.P. Morgan even as J.P. Morgan ramped up Kinexys, its blockchain business formerly known as Onyx, which includes a private payments network and JPM Coin deposit tokens on the public Base blockchain.

Some read that as hypocrisy; others see a savvy TradFi banking CEO doing his job, talking down open networks while his bank builds similar rails that JPMorgan can control.

In this context, J.P. Morgan serves corporates, banks, and institutional clients that move large balances cross-border and within markets like the U.S.

They care about speed and predictability: settling payments in near real time, 24/7/365, instead of waiting days for correspondent banking to catch up. They also care about costs (fees) and liquidity - a clear, real‑time view of where their cash sits across currencies and accounts.

J.P. Morgan wants to strengthen its payments business and stay competitive as financial activity moves on-chain. As Kinexys founder Umar Farooq puts it, “If blockchain is going to disrupt traditional finance, we should own the disruption, rather than be disrupted by others.”

Kinexys Digital Payments uses a private blockchain to let clients move money almost instantly, automate payments, and exchange currencies around the clock. JPM Coin lets approved institutional clients move tokenized bank deposits on Base, a public blockchain.

As of August 2026, J.P. Morgan reported that Kinexys had processed more than $4 trillion in transactions since inception, averaging roughly $7 billion a day.

Which company is embracing public blockchain? BlackRock or JP Morgan?

Ha! Trick question. The answer is both.

For all you recovering curve-busters, check out this free article from JPM about the not free ($11.95), Harvard Business School Case Study: Kinexys by J.P. Morgan: Building Bank Money on Blockchain (revised June 2026).