In a prior life at @jpmorgan, I was the tech lead building out their digital asset trading infrastructure on Ethereum tech. The system went to prod and processed literally trillions of dollars in repo trades: tokenized US dollar deposits (the cash leg) vs. tokenized US Treasuries (the collateral leg). Even though it was a bank blockchain, we still built the whole stack: token contracts, trade contracts, consensus, full nodes, private key management, atomic swaps, administrative controls, point-and-click web apps, role-based permissions, etc. The hardest part was the integration with the legacy systems: (1) the dollar clearing on JPMC's general ledger and (2) the Treasury movements over SWIFT messages. I got to see firsthand where the blockchain rubber meets the banking road. It ain't pretty. Operationally we did double the work, so at times it felt pointless. Still, there is money to be made by making capital markets faster and more accessible, so tokenization will definitely happen, in some form or another. A lot of banks like being slow and cumbersome: that's their moat n' float! The challenge, as @malekanoms notes, is that these banks are very competitive with each other, and they care about who owns the rails. One funny thing about doing this in the early 2020s was that interest rates were so low that even the interest on a billion-dollar repo trade was laughably small. Times have certainly changed. I also came away with another grim conclusion: banks are effectively a fourth branch of the US government. They exist at the mercy of the state; expect a Chokepoint v3.0, 4.0, 5.2.1. The work was fascinating, but I wanted to work on bitcoin, the future of money. I pitched JP Morgan on building a bitcoin custody service. I asked them to give me a team to build it. "This will make you a billion dollars," I told them. But of course they weren't interested ... come on Jamie! 😅 So I left to work on bitcoin and build @stablechannels, and I haven't looked back.