Apex Group, the fund services giant with over $3.5 trillion in assets under administration, expanded its tokenization space with a structured product that offers institutions exposure to bitcoin mining to be issued and managed on US exchange Coinbase’s Ethereum overlay platform, Base.
Since buying real-world asset (RWA) specialist Tokeny last May, Apex has been steamrolling into the tokenization industry, saying on Tuesday it will tokenize the Omnes Mining Note, OMN, an institutional-grade structured note backed by the bitcoin hashrate.
OMN gives professional non-U.S. investors direct financial exposure to new bitcoin production measured in hashrate, which is the computational 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 supported by a fixed 1 petahash per second (1 PH/s) Bitcoin hash rate over the 36-month tenor. Ownership is recorded in ledger form and mirrored onchain under the ERC-3643 standard, according to the Omnes website. ERC-3643 is an Ethereum-based protocol for tokenizing RWAs developed by Tokeny.
“Tokenization gives investors mobility and utility that traditional notes cannot,” Peter Hughes, founder and CEO of Apex Group, said in the statement. “Qualified investors can transfer OMN onchain and over time potentially use it as a form of collateral in permitted lending without selling the asset. This increases liquidity and gives Omnes a more scalable and globally distributable structure.”
Apex said last week that its partnership on the Coinbase Bitcoin Yield Fund, which it handles as a transfer agent and custodian of the funds’ net asset value, would be available to investors on the Base network.
“Bringing a regulated debt product backed by mining onto Base is a huge win. It proves that onchain financing isn’t just for crypto-native assets – it’s for real-world industrial infrastructure, too,” said Jesse Pollak, head of Base.
“Bitcoin mining is the only mechanism that creates new Bitcoin through protocol issuance. This is economically separate from dividend strategies that rely on redistribution of existing Bitcoin,” said Emmanuel Montero, Omnes’ CEO.
