John Wu: TradFi interest in crypto ‘has certainly not diminished’

It may be crypto-winter, but traditional financial institutions persist and continue to influence space, said Ava Labs president John Wu.

Ava Labs operates the Ethereum side chain Avalanche, a smart contract platform designed around sustainability and speed that is home to services for betting, lending and trading cryptocurrency, including dapps Sushi Swap and Nexo. AVAX, up more than 9% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCapnow has a market value of over $ 6 billion.

Wu said companies like JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Société Générale-Forge, a subsidiary of one of France’s largest investment banks, are examples of how financial institutions continue to innovate during the crypto winter and pave the way for broader crypto adoption.

“Institutions trying to use blockchain technology to either streamline or re-tokenize real-world assets have certainly not diminished in their interest,” Wu said. Decrypt at Avalanche House in Brooklyn.

JPMorgan is already using it own stablecoin, JPM Coin – supported 1: 1 by US dollars – as a tokenized form of US dollar deposit that helps simplify transactions for institutional clients. Wu sees the project as a remarkable collision for institutional investors who want to ease into crypto.

He cited recent attempts by JPMorgan with the Monetary Authority of Singapore and DBS Bank Limited, the multinational banking and finance company, to set up a DeFi project around wholesale loans aimed at financial institutions.

“You have large, massive asset management companies that want to start using blockchain and crypto to tokenize assets,” Wu added.

Wu also mentioned one recently measures approved by decentralized stablecoin issuer MakerDAO, which approved $ 30 million in DAI loans to Société Générale-Forge. The company will pay for the loan by issuing “OFH tokens”A digitized version of covered bonds backed by mortgages and rated AAA by Fitch.

Right now, Ava Labs is working with a number of institutional clients that “run the spectrum,” Wu said, including asset management firms looking to get into blockchain use and crypto to tokenize assets, and family offices that want to get involved from an investment perspective.

“It really goes up and down the spectrum,” he said. “The amount of things, for institutional purposes, has only increased.”

Do you want to become a crypto expert? Get the best from Decrypt right to your inbox.

Get the biggest crypto news + weekly summaries and more!