The institutional digital asset market is no longer developing around a single rail or form of money. Bank deposit tokens, stablecoins, tokenised funds, conventional payment systems and public and private blockchains are increasingly being developed in parallel.

For JP Morgan, that fragmentation makes interoperability a business opportunity. Kinexys has evolved from the bank's early blockchain work into infrastructure for moving money, information and assets, while the bank also participates in shared industry initiatives rather than assuming its own network will replace them.

Zack Chestnut, Global Head of Commercial at Kinexys by J.P. Morgan, said clients need better infrastructure around existing money and the ability to connect it to markets and systems that increasingly operate around the clock. The strongest demand, he said, is emerging in cross-border payments, capital markets and adjacent use cases where the connection between currencies and infrastructures remains difficult.

Five Asia-Pacific currencies broaden the always-on network

Kinexys announced the expansion of its   Blockchain Deposit Account (BDA) network on 29 June 2026 by adding Australian dollar, Hong Kong dollar, Japanese yen, Chinese renminbi and Singapore dollar accounts. Together with the existing U.S. dollar, euro and British pound accounts, that brings the network to eight currencies and expands its 24/7 settlement, on-chain foreign-exchange and programmable-payment capabilities across major Asia-Pacific currencies.

At the time of the expansion, Kinexys by J.P. Morgan had processed more than $4 trillion in transaction volume since inception, with average daily transactions exceeding $7 billion. Chestnut said the additional currencies were built in response to client demand, not on the assumption that users would follow once the infrastructure existed.

The demand is tied to practical use cases: companies want to optimise liquidity, automate operational processes and support businesses that increasingly need to transact outside conventional banking hours. Chestnut said demand continues to grow across the currencies Kinexys supports.

Digital asset exchanges and stablecoin issuers have another set of requirements. Chestnut said exchanges need reliable ways for institutional clients to move fiat into and out of their platforms, while stablecoin issuers need fiat operating models capable of matching tokens that are borderless and always available.

The value is moving to the interoperability layer

As more rails emerge, Chestnut sees the connection between them as one of the hardest and most valuable parts of the infrastructure. He described the interoperability layer as the "connective tissue" between otherwise separate systems.

Kinexys has already spent years bridging private and public blockchain infrastructure and connecting fiat systems with token-based infrastructure. Chestnut sees that work as central to its mission because clients increasingly need to move between local real-time payment rails, 24/7 digital-asset markets and tokenised real-world asset markets, often across both currencies and borders.

"That interoperability layer, or that connective tissue... we believe that's the place where most of the value accrues," he said. For Kinexys, that means bridging private and public blockchain infrastructure and connecting fiat systems with token-based infrastructure as clients move between different markets and forms of money.

JP Morgan is combining proprietary infrastructure with industry networks

Chestnut does not see the future as a choice between Kinexys and shared industry infrastructure. J.P. Morgan is pursuing its own platforms while also participating in market-wide initiatives.

J.P. Morgan Payments participates in Swift's Digital Ledger initiative and in US industry efforts involving major commercial banks. It is also a founding shareholder of Partior, the shared-ledger payments network established with DBS and Temasek.

Chestnut characterised this as the need to "go fast" and "go far" at the same time. Proprietary development allows the bank to move quickly with clients, while common clearing infrastructure and industry cooperation are necessary if new forms of money are to achieve broader reach.

Partior illustrates how those approaches can overlap. Chestnut described it as an initiative that straddles the unilateral and multilateral divide, bringing J.P. Morgan together with partner banks and strategic investors around shared ledger infrastructure while Kinexys continues to develop alongside it.

Public blockchains still need legal and market foundations

The interoperability question is also moving beyond private institutional networks. JP Morgan and other financial institutions have begun taking steps towards public blockchain infrastructure, but Chestnut sees meaningful industry wide adoption as dependent on more than technical capability.

He said legal and regulatory certainty, continued product development and sustained client demand all have to develop together. No single institution or regulatory change will be sufficient to create scale.

J.P. Morgan Payments’ move into public blockchain infrastructure predates this year's Sibos. Its US dollar-denominated deposit token, JPM Coin (ticker: JPMD), has been available to institutional clients on Base, an Ethereum layer-2 network, since November 2025 following a proof of concept. The move extends the interoperability challenge from connections among bank-controlled networks to the relationship between regulated bank money and public blockchain infrastructure.

Tokenised cash and assets are starting to meet

Chestnut sees the interaction between tokenised assets and tokenised cash as one of the most promising areas of the market. Asset transactions ultimately require a corresponding movement of money, and tokenisation creates the possibility of bringing bank deposits, stablecoins, money-market funds, bonds, equities, alternative assets and native crypto into infrastructure where they can interact more directly.

That vision is still incomplete. Chestnut expects technology to continue changing business models, legal interpretations and regulatory structures before the market settles. "We are not done yet," he said, pointing to the work still required before historically siloed infrastructures become seamlessly interoperable.

The direction is nevertheless becoming clearer. At Sibos in Miami, Chestnut said he was struck by how central digital assets and tokenisation had become to discussions across banks, Swift and other market participants compared with earlier Sibos meetings.

Always-on money eventually requires automated decision-making

The move towards 24/7 money also creates an operational question: if infrastructure can move money at midnight, who decides to move it? Chestnut said clients rarely want employees manually pressing buttons on weekends and holidays, but many businesses have commercial reasons to make services available during those periods.

Programming and automation therefore become part of the liquidity proposition. They can help companies optimise liquidity and operations while supporting new products and service models without requiring people to intervene continuously.

That brings the Kinexys argument back to interoperability. Chestnut does not expect the end state to be one blockchain, one token or one payment rail. His argument points to an architecture in which conventional and tokenised systems coexist and increasingly operate around the clock. JP Morgan's opportunity is to make the connections between those systems sufficiently reliable that clients do not have to manage the underlying fragmentation themselves.