Tokenized Fund Competition Upgrades: How JPMorgan Chase and BlackRock Are Competing for the Next Generation of Financial Infrastructure?

In the second week of May 2026, two major “heavyweight” moves landed one after another on Wall Street.

On May 7, BlackRock—the world’s largest asset management firm—filed an application with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to add an on-chain digital share class to its existing traditional money market fund, the “BlackRock US Treasury Liquidity Fund (BSTBL),” and simultaneously applied to establish an entirely new on-chain stablecoin reserve fund. This existing fund manages about $6.1 billion in assets. Less than a week later, JPMorgan also submitted an application, announcing the launch of its second tokenized money market fund on Ethereum—JPMorgan On-Chain Liquidity Token Money Market Fund (JLTXX).

With the two applications filed only days apart, their targets overlapped to a striking degree—providing on-chain reserve assets for stablecoin issuers that meet regulatory standards. This is not a coincidence. After the GENIUS Act laid down a compliance framework for the U.S. stablecoin market, Wall Street’s competition logic is shifting from “whether to do it” to “who can do it faster, more compliant, and more systematized.” And behind this race, a deeper proposition is gradually coming into view: the power to define the next generation of financial infrastructure is being rewritten.

Dual Moves Within Five Days

On May 7, 2026, BlackRock submitted two filings to the SEC. One involves setting up an on-chain digital share class for its existing traditional money market fund, “BlackRock US Treasury Liquidity Fund (BSTBL),” which currently manages about $6.1 billion in assets and plans to record it on Ethereum using the ERC-20 token standard. The other filing applies to establish a brand-new “BlackRock Daily Reinvestment Stablecoin Reserve Tool,” positioned as a native tokenized money market fund for stablecoin issuers and on-chain investors. It plans to cover multiple blockchains, with a minimum subscription threshold of $3 million.

On May 12, 2026, JPMorgan submitted an application to launch its second tokenized money market fund JLTXX on Ethereum. The fund will invest more than 99.5% of its assets in short-term U.S. Treasuries and overnight repurchase agreements backed by Treasuries. It will be operated by Kinexys Digital Assets, JPMorgan’s digital assets division, with a minimum investment threshold of $1 million.

The tight scheduling between the two applications and the highly convergent product positioning have pushed Wall Street’s tokenization race directly from the strategic planning phase into the phase of competing for market share.

How the GENIUS Act Reshapes the Track

To understand the essence of this race, it’s necessary to go back to a key turning point: on July 18, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump signed the “Guidance and Establishment of U.S. Stablecoin Innovation Act”—known in the industry as the GENIUS Act. One of the core provisions is that stablecoin issuers must maintain qualifying reserve assets equivalent in value to each dollar of stablecoin issued, as backing. The Act clearly lists the scope of qualifying reserve assets: balances in Federal Reserve accounts, insured deposits, U.S. Treasuries with maturities not exceeding 93 days, overnight repurchase agreements collateralized by Treasuries, and government money market fund shares investing only in the above assets.

At first glance, this rule seems straightforward, yet it creates a completely new demand market. After the Act takes effect, every stablecoin issuer operating in the U.S. must build a compliant reserve asset portfolio within the prescribed timeframe—this is not a matter of voluntary choice, but a statutory requirement.

Before this, stablecoin issuers’ reserve management relied largely on traditional banking channels. However, with the passage of the GENIUS Act, a new proposition emerged: since stablecoins themselves are on-chain assets, why can’t their reserve assets be “on-chain” as well?

Wall Street seized on this logic. The core design goal of BlackRock and JPMorgan’s tokenized funds is to provide stablecoin issuers with a reserve tool that is “native to the chain, compliant with regulation, and capable of generating yield.” In a sense, the GENIUS Act is the match that lit this race.

From a longer historical perspective, the following key milestones form the timeline of this competition:

This timeline clearly reveals a trend: as regulatory frameworks become clearer, traditional financial institutions’ moves to deploy on-chain are being catalyzed at an unprecedented speed.

Scale, Products, and Competitive Position

Market scale and growth momentum

According to RWA.xyz data, as of May 12, 2026, the total market size of tokenized real-world assets has surpassed $32.2 billion. Among them, the tokenized U.S. Treasury market reached $15.2 billion in early May, increasing by $1.06 billion in just the past 30 days. Over the past year, the entire RWA market has grown by more than 200%.

Ethereum dominates the settlement and hosting of tokenized assets, holding a market share of more than 53% and supporting more than 800 tokenization projects.

Main competitor product comparison

Since its launch, BlackRock BUIDL has grown into the largest single tokenized U.S. Treasury product, deployed across multiple blockchain networks including Ethereum, Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism, and Polygon. BNY Mellon serves as the custodian, while Securitize handles issuance and compliance management. Its latest architecture further integrates on-chain shares with the regulatory transfer system, creating a closed loop between on-chain records and the traditional shareholder registration framework.

JPMorgan’s MONY was launched at the end of 2025, but it is far smaller than BUIDL. According to rwa.xyz data, MONY’s assets under management are about $100 million, while BUIDL has reached about $2.6 billion. JLTXX is positioned more precisely in product design—it clearly identifies stablecoin issuers as the core customer base and, in its documentation, introduces USDC and USD exchange integration services.

From the perspective of scale, BlackRock currently has a clear first-mover advantage. However, JLTXX’s design reveals JPMorgan’s thinking about differentiated competition: it is not trying to directly challenge BUIDL on scale. Instead, it is betting that once the GENIUS Act is implemented, it will generate substantial compliance reserve demand among stablecoin issuers—and aims to become the standard setter in this niche track.

JLTXX adopts a “whitelist + priority for official off-chain records” model, reflecting JPMorgan’s extreme caution regarding compliance risk. The documentation clearly stipulates that when there are discrepancies between on-chain data and official off-chain records, the off-chain records take precedence. While this design safeguards compliance, it also creates a fundamental distinction between this product and the “decentralized finance” narrative.

Breaking down market viewpoints: three positions, three narratives

Around this tokenized fund competition, the market has already split into at least three different sets of interpretation logic.

Narrative 1: This is the inevitable outcome of stablecoin regulation, the realization of a “compliance dividend.” This view holds that the GENIUS Act creates a mandatory reserve asset management demand pool, and that traditional financial institutions—naturally advantaged in terms of brand, compliance, and custody—are making rational business decisions to enter the market. BlackRock currently manages about $65 billion in stablecoin reserves for Circle; by migrating reserve management from traditional channels onto the chain, the process is fundamentally an efficiency upgrade rather than an aggressive business transformation. Under this narrative, the race is “predictable, linear, and mild.”

Narrative 2: This is Wall Street’s “land grab” for on-chain financial infrastructure. Analysts supporting this view point out that tokenized funds are not just a product, but a node of financial infrastructure. When JPMorgan positions JLTXX as a future standard for the clearing and reserve back-end systems for banks of global system importance issuing stablecoins, it is trying to seize not only market share, but also the power to define rules at the level of governance. From this perspective, the ultimate goal of this race is not how many fund shares can be sold, but to occupy a pivotal position in the next-generation financial rails.

Narrative 3: This is the “structural absorption” of the crypto industry by the traditional financial system. Observers holding this view believe that although Wall Street’s tokenized products use blockchain technically, governance is entirely centralized—controlled whitelists, official off-chain final records, and institutional access threshold requirements. The promotion of these products may squeeze the survival space of native crypto RWA projects and, ultimately, bring on-chain finance fully into traditional regulatory and governance frameworks. This narrative carries a certain tone of caution, but it is not without logical support.

These three narratives are not mutually exclusive. They describe different facets of the same process from different angles. Overall, at the current stage, the tokenized fund competition has a triple nature—simultaneously “realizing regulatory dividends,” “grabbing infrastructure real estate,” and “structurally absorbing”—and all three are valid and advancing together.

Industry Impact Analysis: Financial Infrastructure Logic Is Being Rewritten

The impact of the tokenized money market fund competition goes far beyond the product layer. It is rewriting the operating logic of financial infrastructure in three directions.

First, the “on-chain” process of dollar liquidity is accelerating. Traditional money market funds are one of the core liquidity management tools in the U.S. financial system. By moving these funds onto blockchain in tokenized form, the issuance, transfer, and settlement of dollar reserve assets can run independently without relying on traditional interbank clearing systems. Geoff Kendrick, global head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered, said, “As banks and other institutions build products in blockchain, in the coming years almost all activities will take place on Ethereum.” If this assessment holds, the on-chain dollar system will upgrade from the current “stablecoin payment layer” to an “on-chain reserve asset layer,” forming a more complete and self-sustaining financial ecosystem.

Second, the role of traditional asset management institutions expands from “asset managers” to “financial infrastructure operators.” Whether it’s the BlackRock Securitize partnership architecture or JPMorgan’s Kinexys platform, these institutions show that they are no longer satisfied with merely managing underlying asset portfolios. They are extending their reach into the operational layer of on-chain infrastructure—token issuance, transfer registration, and on-chain compliance verification. In the traditional financial system, these functions are originally handled by separate custodial banks, transfer agents, and central securities depositories. Once this role expansion forms at scale, it could reshape the structure of the value chain for financial intermediaries.

Third, the regulatory framework is shifting from “following innovation” to “leading innovation.” The regulatory cadence in 2026 is denser than ever: in March, the SEC and CFTC jointly released a 68-page formal interpretive guidance that classifies crypto assets systemically. In the same month, the OCC, the Federal Reserve, and the FDIC jointly confirmed that tokenized securities and traditional securities receive the same capital treatment. The GENIUS Act also set a clear compliance framework for stablecoins. The combined effect of these actions is that traditional financial institutions’ on-chain deployments gain unprecedented legal certainty, clearing key obstacles to large-scale entry.

Conclusion

JPMorgan and BlackRock’s tokenized fund applications are, on the surface, a competition of products, but in substance a contest over discourse power in financial infrastructure.

BlackRock has established an early-mover advantage in the tokenized U.S. Treasury track with an asset management scale of around $2.6 billion BUIDL. Through its long-term cooperation with Securitize, it has built a standardized architecture of “issuance + custody + on-chain verification.” JPMorgan, using JLTXX as its vehicle, aims to build a banking-grade moat in the compliant reserve assets domain under the GENIUS Act. Their competitive logics differ, but the end point may point to the same future: an on-chain financial new order dominated by traditional financial institutions, built on compliant public blockchains as the underlying rail, and deeply integrated with the existing regulatory system.

For participants in the industry, what needs attention is not who sold more fund shares in the short term, but what assumptions this competition itself is turning into reality: tokenization shifting from narrative to institution, from experimentation to scale, and from a native crypto ecosystem into the core areas of traditional finance. When financial giants begin describing blockchain in public filings as infrastructure for fund issuance and record-keeping—not merely an experimental technology—the intergenerational transition of the financial system may already have quietly begun.

What must remain clear-eyed is that this process is still at an extremely early stage. The tokenized U.S. Treasury market size of $15.2 billion is small compared with the global money market funds total of more than $60 trillion. It is like a stream compared to a mighty river. But the direction of that stream may well be signaling the course of the next generation of financial infrastructure waterways.