In June we reported that Umar Farooq, the CEO of Onyx by JP Morgan, was promoted to co-lead Payments. That followed the departure of Takis Georgakopoulos. Now the Onyx blockchain arm will be co-led by the two most senior executives in the division, Naveen Mallela who already heads Onyx Coin Systems and Tyrone Lobban, the leader of Blockchain Launch and Onyx Digital Assets.
For such a large bank, JP Morgan has been a major innovator in the blockchain space. Years before zero knowledge proofs (ZKP) were available on the public Ethereum blockchain, the bank concluded it needed a permissioned version and adopted ZKP for privacy, with help from ZCash. Work on Ethereum-based Quorum started in 2016 and it became one of the top three enterprise blockchains.
By 2020 it concluded that managing permissioned blockchain technology wasn’t really the role of a bank and it transferred it to Consensys. Around the same time, it formed the Onyx unit.
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