TL;DR:
Apex Group, the fund services giant with over $3.5 trillion in assets under administration, announced the tokenization of the Omnes Mining Note (OMN), an institutional-grade structured note backed by Bitcoin hashrate. The product will be issued and managed on Base, the Ethereum platform developed by U.S. exchange Coinbase.
The initiative was announced following the acquisition of Tokeny, a real-world asset (RWA) specialist completed last year. Since then, Apex has expanded its presence in the tokenization market at an unusual pace for a firm with its traditional profile.
OMN offers non-U.S. professional investors direct economic exposure to new Bitcoin production, measured in hashrate, without the operational costs associated with mining: infrastructure, hardware, energy, or regulations. Each unit is backed by a fixed petahash per second over a 36-month period. Ownership is recorded as a book entry and replicated on-chain under the ERC-3643 standard, an Ethereum-based protocol for tokenizing RWAs developed by Tokeny itself.
Peter Hughes, founder and CEO of Apex Group, highlighted that tokenization brings mobility and utility that traditional notes cannot offer. According to Hughes, qualified investors will be able to transfer the OMN on-chain and, over time, potentially use it as collateral in lending operations within permissioned environments, without having to liquidate it. This improves liquidity and gives the structure greater scalability and global distributability.
Jesse Pollak, head of Base, noted that bringing a regulated debt product backed by mining to the network is a major step forward for the industry: on-chain finance is not limited to native crypto assets, but can extend into the real-world industrial infrastructure.
Emmanuel Montero, CEO of Omnes, underscored the instrument’s conceptual distinction: Bitcoin mining is the only mechanism that generates new Bitcoin through protocol issuance, which distinguishes it economically from yield strategies based on redistributing already-existing Bitcoin.
Last week, Apex had reported that its participation in the Coinbase Bitcoin Yield Fund, for which it acts as transfer agent and net asset value custodian, would also be available to investors on the Base network.
