Apex Group, the fund services giant with more than $3.5 trillion in assets under management, has expanded its tokenization range with a structured product that offers institutions exposure to bitcoin. mining, which will be issued and managed on Base, the Ethereum overlay platform of the US exchange Coinbase.
Since purchasing real-world asset (RWA) specialist Tokeny last May, Apex has been dabbling in the tokenization industry, and on Tuesday said it will tokenize Omnes Mining Note, OMN, an institutional-grade structured note backed by bitcoin hashrate.
OMN provides non-U.S. professional investors with direct economic exposure to new bitcoin production measured in hashrate, which is the computing power used to validate transactions and produce the largest cryptocurrency, without the operational complexities of managing mining infrastructure, hardware, power or regulatory hurdles, according to a statement.
Each OMN is backed by a fixed rate of 1 petahash per second (1 PH/s) of Bitcoin hashrate over the 36-month term. Ownership is recorded in book-entry form and reflected on-chain according to the ERC-3643 standard, according to the Omnes website. ERC-3643 is an Ethereum-based protocol for tokenizing RWA developed by Tokeny.
“Tokenization provides investors with mobility and utility that traditional notes cannot,” Peter Hughes, founder and CEO of Apex Group, said in the statement. “Qualified investors can transfer OMN on-chain and, over time, potentially use it as a form of collateral on qualified loans without selling the asset. This improves liquidity while giving Omnes a more scalable and globally distributable structure.”
Apex said last week that its Coinbase Bitcoin Yield Fund partnership, which it operates as a transfer agent and recorder of the fund’s net asset value, would be available to investors on the Base network.
“Bringing a regulated mining-backed debt product to Base is a huge win. It demonstrates that on-chain finance is not just for crypto-native assets, but for real-world industrial infrastructure as well,” said Base Director Jesse Pollak.
“Bitcoin mining is the only mechanism that creates new Bitcoin through the issuance of protocols. This is economically distinct from yield strategies that rely on the redistribution of existing Bitcoin,” said Emmanuel Montero, CEO of Omnes.
