Apex Group, the fund services giant with over $3.5 trillion in assets under administrative care, extended its tokenization range with a structured product offering institutions exposure to bitcoin mining, to be issued and managed on U.S. 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, and on Tuesday said it will tokenize the Omnes Mining Note, OMN, an institutional-grade structured note backed by bitcoin hashrate.
The OMN provides professional non-U.S. investors with direct economic 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 backed by a fixed 1 petahash per second (1 PH/s) of Bitcoin hashrate for the duration of the 36-month tenor. Ownership is recorded in book-entry 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,” said Peter Hughes, founder and CEO of Apex Group, in the statement. “Qualified investors can transfer OMN onchain and, over time, potentially use it as a form of collateral in permissioned lending without selling the asset. This enhances 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 handles as a transfer agent and record keeper 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 finance 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 distinct from yield strategies that rely on redistributing existing Bitcoin,” said Emmanuel Montero, Omnes' CEO.