Goldman Sachs has conducted its first repo trade using JPMorgan’s private blockchain network.
According to a report by Bloomberg on Tuesday, the initial trade was conducted by Goldman on June 17 and came in the form of a tokenized version of a U.S. Treasury bond swapped for JPMCoin. The transaction took three hours and five minutes to complete.
JPMCoin is the investment bank’s stablecoin pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar.
“We see this as a pivotal moment for the digitization of transactional activity,” said Mathew McDermott, global head of digital assets for Goldman’s global markets division, per the report.
Repurchase agreements, or repos for short, are a type of loan where financial institutions sell collateralized securities in a contract only to buy them back at an inflated price at some other date, usually overnight. It is particularly beneficial to banks as it enables them to borrow on the cheap.
McDermott said the blockchain development was a huge boon to the repo market, currently valued at over $4.6 trillion globally, given how repos function with collateral and cash being interchanged simultaneously and instantaneously.
“We pay interest per the minute,” said McDermott. “We firmly think this will change the nature of the intraday marketplace.”
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