There’s a growing divide at the center of the digital asset universe, and it’s one that breaks cleanly over the sector’s fundamental technology: Distributed ledgers, or blockchains.
Public blockchains remain the center of gravity for crypto innovation. These networks, like Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, the Ripple ledger, Polygon, Avalanche and others, are typically open, composable and ideologically aligned with decentralization.
But as blockchains find their footing inside financial institutions, the rise of private chains, or permissioned distributed ledgers, is becoming impossible to ignore. This, after all, is where much of the growth in enterprise blockchain adoption over the past two years has occurred.
The Monday (Dec. 15) news that JPMorgan Chase is reportedly deepening its blockchain efforts with its first tokenized money market fund, the private “My OnChain Net Yield Fund” (MONY). That initiative is supported by JPMorgan’s private, permissioned tokenization platform, Kinexys Digital Assets, which is not a public chain.
Elsewhere, HSBC, Swift and Ant International tested a new cross-border payment solution on Dec. 11 using the latter’s proprietary and permissioned private blockchain and HSBC’s internal tokenization platform.
This is not a rejection of blockchain’s technical model, but an implicit posture that existing open blockchain networks are not necessarily compatible with the operational realities of regulated finance.
See also: How Blockchain Works: When Transactions Are Also Settlements, Reconciliation Disappears
Centralized Coordination Lets Financial Incumbents Experiment On-Chain
Private blockchain systems rarely generate headlines because they do not resemble the original crypto vision. They are closed to the public, participants are vetted and governance is explicit. Legal agreements exist outside the code. And critically, someone can be held responsible.
Every financial system, whether centralized or decentralized, must answer the same uncomfortable questions: Who owns end-to-end operational and financial risk? Who resolves disputes? Who intervenes when a system fails or is attacked? Where is the contractual framework that assigns liability?
In public blockchains, these questions are often answered indirectly, through incentives, social consensus or governance tokens. That model has proven fragile under stress. Failures in decentralized finance over the past several years exposed the limits of “code is law” when bugs, exploits or economic attacks occur. When failures occur, as they did repeatedly during the early 2020s, there may be no clear counterparty accountable for remediation.
For banks and their regulators, whether a system is “on-chain” ultimately matters less than whether risks are understood, controlled and supervised.
Closed and permissioned blockchains address this directly. They replace emergent governance with explicit control structures: operating agreements, rulebooks, escalation processes and liability frameworks. This makes them less flexible, but far more usable at scale.
Read more: Building the Blockchain Blueprint: How Leading FIs Are Modernizing Money, Markets and Trust
What Institutional Momentum Signals About 2026
Tokenization has been promoted as a way to radically restructure capital markets by putting assets directly on-chain. In theory, this could reduce intermediaries, compress settlement cycles and increase liquidity.
In practice, the implementations gaining traction are tightly controlled.
Most tokenized bonds, funds and structured products in 2025 are issued on permissioned platforms operated by banks or market infrastructure providers. These platforms integrate with traditional custody, compliance and reporting systems. Transfers are restricted to approved participants. Smart contracts automate defined processes, but they do not eliminate oversight.
Underscoring the fundamental role of oversight, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last week issued a no-action letter to the Depository Trust Company, allowing it to pilot a blockchain-based system for tokenized securities entitlements, a statement that framed tokenization as a “trending” but regulated evolution of market structure.
PYMNTS covered how this approach also reflects a growing consensus among large financial institutions that the future of tokenization is likely to be permissioned, not permissionless, and integrated, not parallel, to existing systems.
More here: Making Sense of Public Versus Private Blockchains for Banks
Still, that doesn’t mean that financial institutions aren’t experimenting with public chains. Last week (Dec. 11), JPMorgan successfully arranged a U.S. commercial paper issuance on the Solana blockchain, not its own private chain, marking one of the earliest debt issuances ever executed on a public blockchain.
It also doesn’t mean that crypto-natives aren’t experimenting with their own private chains, either. The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) on Friday (Dec. 12) conditionally approved applications for new national bank trust charters to five applicants from the digital asset and blockchain finance space, charters that could see them launch their own privately-owned on-chain financial infrastructure.
