Apex Group, the fund services giant with more than $3.5 trillion in assets under administrative care, expanded its tokenization reach with a structured product that offers institutions exposure to bitcoin BTC$71,199.87 mining, to be issued and managed on the Ethereum overlay platform of the American exchange Coinbase, Base.
Since purchasing real-world asset (RWA) specialist Tokeny last May, Apex has entered the tokenization industry and said Tuesday it will tokenize the Omnes Mining Note, OMN, an institutional-grade structured note backed by bitcoin hashrate.
The OMN provides professional non-U.S. investors with direct economic exposure to the production of new bitcoins, measured in hashrate, the computing power used to validate transactions and produce the largest cryptocurrency, without the operational complexity of managing mining infrastructure, hardware, energy or regulatory hurdles, according to a release.
Each OMN is backed by a fixed 1 petahash per second (1 PH/s) Bitcoin hashrate for the duration of the 36-month term. Ownership is recorded in the form of a book and mirrored down the chain under the ERC-3643 standard, according to the Omnes website. ERC-3643 is an Ethereum-based protocol for tokenizing RWAs developed by Tokeny.
“Tokenization gives investors mobility and utility that traditional banknotes cannot provide,” Peter Hughes, founder and CEO of Apex Group, said in the statement. “Qualified investors can transfer OMN onchain and potentially use it over time as a form of collateral on permitted loans without selling the asset. This improves liquidity and gives Omnes a more scalable and globally distributable structure.”
Apex said last week that its partnership with the Coinbase Bitcoin Yield Fund, which it manages as transfer agent and registrar of the fund’s net asset value, would be available to investors on the Base network.
“Bringing a regulated debt product backed by mining to Base is a huge win. It proves that onchain finance is not just for crypto-native assets, but also for real-world industrial infrastructure,” said Jesse Pollak, head of Base.
“Bitcoin mining is the only mechanism that creates new Bitcoin through protocol issuance. This is economically different from return strategies that rely on the redistribution of existing Bitcoin,” said Emmanuel Montero, CEO of Omnes.