Apex Group, a leading fund services company with over $3.5 trillion in assets under management, has expanded its tokenization reach with a structured product that provides institutions with exposure to Bitcoin. BTC$71,199.87 Mining is issued and managed on Base, the Ethereum overlay platform of US exchange Coinbase.
Since acquiring real world asset (RWA) specialist Tokeny last May, Apex has been well on its way into the tokenization industry, announcing on Tuesday that it would tokenize Omnes Mining Notes (OMN), an institutional structured note backed by Bitcoin hashrate.
According to the release, OMN provides professional investors outside the U.S. with direct financial exposure to new Bitcoin generation as measured by hash rate (the computational power used to validate transactions and generate the largest amount of cryptocurrency) without the operational complexity of managing mining infrastructure, hardware, energy, or regulatory hurdles.
Each OMN is backed by a fixed Bitcoin hash rate of 1 petahash per second (1 PH/s) for a period of 36 months. According to the Omnes website, ownership is recorded in book-entry form and mirrored on-chain based on the ERC-3643 standard. ERC-3643 is an Ethereum-based protocol for tokenizing RWA developed by Tokeny.
“Tokenization gives investors mobility and utility not available with traditional banknotes,” Peter Hughes, founder and CEO of Apex Group, said in a statement. “Qualified investors will be able to transfer OMN on-chain and, in the long term, have the potential to use it as a form of collateral for granted loans without selling the asset. This will enhance liquidity while giving Omnes a scalable and globally decentralized structure.”
Apex announced last week that its partnership in the Coinbase Bitcoin Yield Fund, where the company acts as transfer agent and record keeper of the fund’s net asset value, will be available to investors on the Base network.
“Introducing a mining-backed regulated fixed income product to Base is a huge win. It proves that on-chain finance is not just for crypto-native assets, but also for real-world industrial infrastructure,” said Jesse Pollack, Head of Base.
“Bitcoin mining is the only mechanism to create new Bitcoin through protocol issuance. It is economically different from existing yield strategies that rely on redistribution of Bitcoin,” said Emmanuel Montero, CEO of Omnes.
