Middle East Banking Titan Adopts JPMorgan’s Blockchain—Is Traditional Finance Finally Catching Up?

JPMorgan’s blockchain just scored a major win—and it’s not from Wall Street. A Middle East banking giant is ditching legacy systems for Onyx, JPM’s enterprise-grade blockchain platform. Here’s why it matters.

The Backroom Revolution

No flashy crypto tokens here. This is about back-office efficiency—settlements, cross-border payments, and trade finance. The unnamed institution (likely one of the UAE’s heavyweight banks) is betting blockchain can slash costs where Swift and old-school ledgers can’t.

The Cynic’s Corner

Let’s be real: banks love ‘innovation’ when it means firing half their ops team. JPM’s blockchain cuts settlement times from days to hours—great for balance sheets, brutal for middle-office jobs. But hey, at least they didn’t pick a ‘risky’ public chain.

What’s Next?

Watch for copycat moves. If this rollout works, expect a domino effect across Gulf banks—all desperate to look ‘digital’ while avoiding anything that smells of DeFi. The irony? They’ll use blockchain to rebuild the exact same systems… just faster.

JPMorgan’s blockchain network handles $3 billion daily

JPMorgan launched the Kinexys network in 2019. It now processes $3 billion in transactions daily.

That sounds substantial, but it represents just a small slice of the roughly $10 trillion the bank’s payment operations handle every day.

As the biggest US dollar clearing bank globally, JPMorgan wants to grow the platform by tapping into its extensive correspondent banking network.

Opening the network to other financial institutions lets JPMorgan reach companies that don’t bank directly with them, according to Naveen Mallela, who runs Kinexys alongside another executive. “This is institutional-grade scale,” Mallela said.

As reported by Cryptopolitan Swift is also running its own blockchain tests. The messaging network that connects more than 11,000 banks is checking whether its Core system could eventually operate on blockchain technology. BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon and other major banks are participating in the trial.

Results from the Swift pilot won’t come for months. One banker working on it called the project “an important technological transformation for the international interbank payments industry.” The development was first reported by Grégory Raymond of The Big Whale on X.

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