JPMorgan Backs Ownera Raise $20 Million To Boost Trading Of Tokenized Assets

Ownera, an interoperability trading network for tokenized assets, has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round from multinational investment bank JPMorgan, real estate investment and fund management firm LRC Group and Accomplice Blockchain, a firm that builds blockchain companies.

The funding round also includes Draper Goren Holm, tokentus Investment AG, Polymorphic Capital, The Ropart Group and Archax. The funds will be used to accelerate the pace of the network's growth and deployment of a "global interoperability network to unlock the institutional tokenized securities market," Ownera announced Wednesday.

The U.K.- based company was founded in 2019 and its goal was to "create a global unified inter-trading pipeline for digital securities, efficiently connecting siloed tokenization platforms and trading interfaces." It provides its clients with a "unified digital securities wallet, connected to a single API that aggregates and normalizes the offerings."

This will help clients invest, trade, lend and borrow against the "connected set of tokenized assets."

"Dozens of platforms are being deployed by financial institutions across the market, and our job is to be the neutral layer, seamlessly interconnecting them into one global distribution and liquidity network, using open-source network specifications," explained Ownera Co-Founder and CEO Ami Ben-David.

JPMorgan's Scott Lucas said the major requirement for maintaining a liquid marketplace for tokenized assets is interconnectivity. "Ownera has developed a solution with the potential to connect multiple platforms to start building towards that liquid marketplace," he added.

Interestingly, JPMorgan predicted Bitcoin could hit $50,000 or $100,000 by end of last year but the all-time high of the world's biggest cryptocurrency was $69,000 in November.

"A convergence in volatilities between bitcoin and gold is unlikely to happen quickly and is in our mind a multi-year process," said JPMorgan while comparing Bitcoin to gold.