Apex Group, the fund services giant with more than $3.5 trillion in assets under administration, has expanded its tokenization suite with a structured product offering institutions exposure to bitcoin. mining, which will be issued and managed on the Ethereum overlay platform of the American exchange Coinbase, Base.
Since purchasing real-world asset (RWA) specialist Tokeny last May, Apex has moved into the tokenization business and announced on Tuesday that it would tokenize the Omnes Mining Note, OMN, an institutional-grade structured note backed by the 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, energy or regulatory hurdles, according to a release.
Each OMN is backed by a fixed Bitcoin hash rate of 1 petahash per second (1 PH/s) for the duration of 36 months. The property is registered in book-entry form and mirrored on-chain under ERC-3643, according to the Omnes website. ERC-3643 is an Ethereum-based protocol for RWA tokenization 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 release. “Accredited investors can move OMN onto the chain and, over time, potentially use it as a form of collateral in authorized loans without selling the asset. This improves liquidity while giving Omnes a more scalable and globally distributable structure.”
Apex said last week that its partnership on the Coinbase Bitcoin Yield Fund, which it manages as a transfer agent and custodian of the fund’s net asset value, would be available to investors in the Base network.
“Introducing a regulated mining-backed debt product on Base is a huge win. It proves that on-chain finance isn’t just for crypto-native assets – it also applies to real-world industrial infrastructure,” said Jesse Pollak, Director of Base.
“Bitcoin mining is the only mechanism that creates new Bitcoins 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.
