For years, the mantra among Wall Street’s old guard was consistent: blockchain might touch payments, it might touch settlements, but it would never touch core cash products. All preconceived ideas about this were wrong after the earthquake occurred in the bank of JPMorgan Chase (a $4 trillion financial institution) with their creation of MONY, a tokenized money market fund which exists on the Ethereum Blockchain, which has rocked the Financial Services industry. They have created a programmable version of this product, making it one of the most significant advancements in technology for traditional banks. As a result of this creation banks now have new thoughts regarding money than they had ever before.
Enter MONY: Cash on the Chain
MONY (My OnChain Net Yield) is a new form of fund that is a departure from traditional institutional funding models. Unlike previous institutional funding models, MONY utilizes a public blockchain (Ethereum), leveraging the bank’s proprietary Kinexys Digital Assets platform.
Investors who meet qualifications for MONY will be able to hold digital tokens representing a fractional ownership position in a collection of U.S. Treasury securities with maturities of less than 12 months. The difference between MONY and previous funding models is that due to the programmability of these tokens, they will include on-chain record of the daily dividend payments, and allow for both subscription and redemption using fiat currency and stablecoins. This innovation will allow for near real-time settlement of applications for subscriptions or redemptions, and addresses the longstanding issues associated with T+1 and T+2 timeframes commonly associated with traditional money market funding models.
The Strategic Shift
Money market funds are the unglamorous plumbing of the global financial system, holding over $7 trillion in assets to preserve capital and manage liquidity. For years, this scale made them too important to risk on “experimental” technology.
Nonetheless, with the enactment of the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act (GENIUS) in July 2025, there was a significant shift in the perceived risk associated with the use of blockchain technology. This legislation gave banks a clear path to starting using stablecoins and tokenized assets in a compliant manner. Banks now have the necessary guidance and framework to begin issuing new products through the blockchain, thus moving JPMorgan out of the sidelines and onto the field.
Two Visions for the Future
JPMorgan’s bold stance is a signal that the gap in ideology on Wall Street continues to grow. On the one hand, as a “cloud-native” business, JPMorgan has chosen to issue tokens directly onto a public blockchain. Goldman Sachs and BNY Mellon, on the other hand, have taken a somewhat more reflective and cautious approach.
Earlier this year, the Goldman-BNY alliance launched a joint initiative to tokenize records of existing funds rather than creating blockchain-native funds. In their model, the assets stay in traditional systems while tokens act as digital mirrors.
“There is a divide in these approaches,” notes one fintech analyst. “Some see blockchain as a new financial operating layer—the JPMorgan view—while others see it merely as a faster database that leaves existing control structures intact. Both are progress, but they are building toward very different futures.”
The Gatekeeping Debate
MONY is not an open multi-party DeFi Protocol but rather a highly-controlled access protocol intended for select Qualified Institutional Investors with significant minimum commitments; as a result, some people see MONY as hindering the idea of financial decentralization instead of enabling it.
Some see proof of this with the model that MONY is using because it only allows those who are able to invest large amounts and that those who do are all large banks or corporations, thus there is a danger that MONY is simply replicating the same issues that exist in traditional banking; the supporters of MONY argue that for this model to work at scale, large financial pools will require a specific level of institutional trust. An institution will require a high level of regulatory compliance, custody, and risk management around its investments and therefore will not be able to use a completely open and trustless DeFi protocol.
A Signal to the Boardroom
Rather than being primarily a product launch, the launch of MONY provides both an opportunity for corporate boards and treasury managers to realize that digitizing cash is now inevitable vs possibly. Furthermore, tokenising cash will offer firms opportunities for transferring value with the same ease as transferring information. This will lead to reduced risk in settlement processes and allow firms to release capital previously tied up in bank accounts. Due to the increasing number of firms, including BlackRock, Fidelity, and State Street, looking at this type of structure, as well as the growing number of firms using on-chain treasury solutions, competitive pressures will increase dramatically in 2026. As the market continues to grow, the speed at which it will impact traditional plumbing systems in daily financing will continue to accelerate.
