Apex Group, a fund services giant with over $3.5 trillion in assets under management, has expanded its tokenization reach with structured products offering institutions exposure to Bitcoin Mining will be issued and managed on Base, the Ethereum-covered platform of the US exchange Coinbase.
Apex has been making a big push into the tokenization industry since acquiring real-world asset (RWA) specialist Tokeny last May, and on Tuesday said it would tokenize Omnes Mining Note (OMN), an institutional-grade structured note backed by Bitcoin hash power.
According to a press release, OMN provides professional non-U.S. investors with direct economic exposure to new Bitcoin production measured in hash rate, which is the computing power used to verify transactions and produce the largest cryptocurrency without the operational complexity of managing mining infrastructure, hardware, energy or regulatory hurdles.
Each OMN is backed by a fixed 1 petahash per second (1 PH/s) of Bitcoin computing power for a 36-month period. According to the Omnes website, ownership is recorded in a ledger and mirrored on-chain according to the ERC-3643 standard. ERC-3643 is an Ethereum-based RWA tokenization protocol developed by Tokeny.
“Tokenization provides investors with liquidity and utility that traditional paper currencies cannot provide,” Peter Hughes, founder and CEO of Apex Group, said in a statement. “Qualified investors can transfer OMN on-chain, potentially using it as collateral for licensed loans over time without the need to sell the asset. This enhances liquidity while providing Omnes with a more scalable and globally distributable structure.”
Apex said last week that its partnership with the Coinbase Bitcoin Income Fund, which is managed as the transfer agent and recordkeeper of the fund’s net asset value, will be open to investors on the Base network.
Jesse Pollak, Head of Base, said: “The introduction of mining-backed regulated debt products to Base is a huge win. It proves that on-chain finance is not only applicable to crypto-native assets, but also to real-world industrial infrastructure.”
“Bitcoin mining is the only mechanism for creating new Bitcoins through protocol issuance. This is economically different from revenue strategies that rely on the redistribution of existing Bitcoins,” said Omnes CEO Emmanuel Montero.
