JPMorgan brings U.S. debt issuance onto a popular blockchain

A major Wall Street bank has just moved a slice of the U.S. money market onto a public blockchain.

Instead of living on a bank’s internal ledger, a new batch of short-term U.S. debt now exists as tokens on Solana, with cash legged in and out via a dollar stablecoin.

The deal showcases that institutions are no longer just testing private chains in sandboxes, but beginning to transact in size on public networks.

Related: Explained: What is a stablecoin?

Wall Street’s first U.S. debt deal on a public blockchain

J.P. Morgan has arranged a U.S. commercial paper issuance for digital asset financial firm, Galaxy Digital, on the Solana blockchain, with the securities purchased by Coinbase and asset manager Franklin Templeton, according to an official press release.

Commercial paper is a short-term IOU that big companies use to borrow money for a few weeks. Investors lend the money, and the company pays it back quickly.

The bank acted as arranger, created an on-chain commercial paper token and handled delivery-versus-payment settlement between issuer and investors. 

Both the issuance and redemption cash flows are set to be paid in USDC, the dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by Circle, making it a rare case where both the asset and the cash leg are fully tokenized. 

J.P. Morgan called the transaction “one of the earliest debt issuances ever executed on a public blockchain” and “among the first in the U.S. to harness blockchain for the issuance and servicing of securities,” describing it as a “significant milestone for financial markets globally.” 

Scott Lucas, Head of Markets Digital Assets at J.P. Morgan, said the bank views the deal as a live experiment in how large markets could migrate on-chain. 

“Today’s transaction is an important step toward understanding the role blockchain will play in the future of financial markets.” 

Why Solana and why now

The commercial paper is issued as a digital token on Solana rather than as a traditional entry in a custodian or dealer’s ledger. 

Solana has become a preferred blockchain for institutional experiments because it’s built for speed and scale. 

The network can process thousands of transactions per second with extremely low fees, making it ideal for financial instruments like commercial paper, bonds, or settlement transactions that require fast, predictable execution. 

Unlike older blockchains that slow down under load, Solana’s parallelized architecture allows high-volume activity without congestion, a crucial requirement for banks, asset managers, and exchanges testing real-world settlement on public chains.

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JPMorgan’s move signals a new phase in onchain finance

For J.P. Morgan, this is not the first time it has used blockchain for debt.

However, it is one of the first times a major U.S. commercial paper deal has gone to a public network rather than the bank’s own permissioned system. 

Earlier issuances ran on its private platform for municipal bonds and commercial paper, while this structure pushes those experiments into the open.

Franklin Templeton’s head of innovation, Sandy Kaul, said:

Institutions are “no longer just experimenting with blockchain - we’re transacting on it in a big way,” arguing that each new on-chain deal “accelerates our collective journey toward a more open, efficient, and resilient financial ecosystem.” 

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