Goldman Sachs reportedly started trading JPMorgan’s blockchain repo

After Goldman Sachs spent six months looking at JPMorgan Chase’s bespoke blockchain service for repo markets, he started trading on the platform.

Mathew McDermott, Global Head of Digital Assets for Goldman Sachs’ Global Markets Division, confirmed the first transaction in an interview on June 17, Bloomberg reported.

During the transaction, Goldman Sachs exchanged the crypto version of a US government bond for JPM Coin, JPMorgan’s dollar-pegged stablecoin. JPMorgan launched its private blockchain service last year to make repo transactions more efficient. The platform uses JPM Coin to exchange digitized US Treasuries.

Goldman Sachs was one of the first financial institutions to pay attention to the platform. Last year, McDermott mentioned the effectiveness of JPMorgan’s blockchain-based retail market service, saying that “corporate blockchain can solve a real problem in the financial system”.

As a trillion dollar market, repurchase agreements or “repos” are short-term loan arrangements for government bond dealers. Overnight repo trading allows traders to sell government bonds to investors and buy them back the next day at a slightly higher price.

Related: Goldman Sachs Offers Bitcoin Futures Trading

McDermott called the transaction a key moment for the digitization of transaction activity and emphasized that, unlike the traditional repo market, thanks to blockchain technology, the exact time of a transaction can be recorded.

Smart contracts on blockchain allow collateral and cash to be exchanged simultaneously and instantly, and this is a huge step forward for the repo market, according to McDermott:

“We pay interest every minute. We are sure that this will change the market for today. “

JPMorgan Chase announced the introduction of its own stablecoin for the first time in early 2019, with an initial focus on the international settlements of large companies. The first transactions started in December and since then JPM Coin has been accepted by transnational companies for cross-border payments around the clock.

The bank has launched its version of the Ethereum blockchain, Onyx, which currently processes over $ 1 billion in transactions every day.