1. A New Category of Tokenized Asset Enters the Market
Apex Group, one of the world's largest fund services providers with more than $3.5 trillion in assets under administrative care, has announced the tokenization of a structured financial product that links institutional investors directly to Bitcoin mining output. The product, known as the Omnes Mining Note (OMN), will be issued and managed on Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network developed by Coinbase. The initiative represents a novel addition to the rapidly expanding tokenized real-world asset market by packaging the economic output of Bitcoin mining — specifically, newly produced coins generated through computational work — into a regulated debt instrument that can be distributed and transferred onchain among approved investors. It marks the first time a major fund services firm has brought a hashrate-backed structured product to a public blockchain.
2. Each Note Represents a Fixed Allocation of Mining Power
The OMN is structured as a secured debt note in which each unit represents exactly 1 petahash per second of Bitcoin hashrate, maintained for the duration of a 36-month term. This means that investors holding the note gain direct economic exposure to the Bitcoin that is mined using that allocated computational power over three years, without needing to purchase, operate, or maintain any mining hardware. The hashrate-based structure is designed to separate investment exposure from the operational complexities of running mining facilities — including hardware procurement, energy sourcing, cooling infrastructure, site management, and the ongoing technical maintenance that industrial-scale mining demands. By denominating exposure in petahashes rather than in Bitcoin directly, the product ties investor returns to the productive capacity of the mining operation rather than to secondary market price movements alone.
3. The Product Targets Professional Non-U.S. Investors
The OMN is being offered exclusively to professional non-U.S. investors, a designation that encompasses institutional allocators such as pension funds, endowments, family offices, sovereign wealth entities, and qualified investment firms. This geographic and accreditation limitation reflects the current regulatory landscape for tokenized securities, where compliance requirements differ significantly across jurisdictions. The product uses the ERC-3643 token standard, a framework specifically designed for permissioned security tokens that encodes investor verification checks directly into the token itself. Under this system, only investors who have completed the required onboarding and identity verification process can hold or transfer the asset, with each wallet linked to a verified identity. This architecture ensures that the product operates within the bounds of applicable securities regulations while still benefiting from the efficiency and programmability of blockchain-based issuance.
4. Apex's Tokeny Acquisition Powers the Tokenization Infrastructure
The OMN issuance builds on infrastructure that Apex acquired through its purchase of Tokeny, a specialist in real-world asset tokenization, completed in May 2025. Since that acquisition, Apex has aggressively expanded its presence in the tokenization space, leveraging Tokeny's technology platform — including the T-REX Ledger — to bring traditional financial products onto blockchain rails. The firm has publicly stated its intention to tokenize $100 billion in funds using the T-REX Ledger by June 2027, a target that positions it as one of the most ambitious institutional players in the onchain asset issuance space. Tokeny's platform had already facilitated the tokenization of more than $32 billion in assets prior to the Apex acquisition, providing a proven technical foundation for the kind of regulated, compliance-embedded token issuance that the OMN requires.
5. Coinbase's Base Network Serves as the Issuance Platform
The decision to issue the OMN on Base reflects Coinbase's growing ambition to position its layer-2 network as the primary onchain venue for institutional-grade financial products. Base operates as an Ethereum overlay network, inheriting Ethereum's security guarantees while offering lower transaction costs and faster execution. The platform has been steadily building its profile as a hub for tokenized funds and regulated financial instruments. Just last week, Apex announced that its partnership with Coinbase Asset Management on the Coinbase Bitcoin Yield Fund — for which Apex serves as transfer agent and net asset value record keeper — would also be made available to investors on the Base network. Jesse Pollak, who leads the Base platform, described the OMN issuance as significant validation of the network's capabilities, arguing that it demonstrates how onchain finance can extend beyond crypto-native assets to encompass real-world industrial infrastructure.
6. Mining Output as a Distinct Economic Proposition
Omnes CEO Emmanuel Montero drew a clear distinction between the OMN and other Bitcoin investment vehicles when describing the product's economic rationale. He emphasized that Bitcoin mining is the only mechanism through which new Bitcoin enters circulation via protocol issuance — a fundamentally different proposition from yield strategies that rely on redistributing or lending existing coins. This framing positions the OMN as providing exposure to a primary production process rather than to a secondary market activity. For institutional investors, the distinction matters because it offers a form of Bitcoin exposure that is partially insulated from the dynamics of spot market trading. While the value of mined Bitcoin is ultimately determined by market prices, the hashrate-backed structure means that the investor's economic interest is tied to the ongoing creation of new supply rather than to the price movements of coins already in circulation.
7. Removing the Operational Burden of Mining Participation
One of the central value propositions of the OMN is the elimination of operational complexity for investors seeking exposure to Bitcoin mining economics. Running a mining operation at institutional scale requires significant capital expenditure on specialized hardware, access to competitively priced electricity, physical facility management, cooling infrastructure, cybersecurity protocols, and ongoing technical expertise to maintain optimal performance as network difficulty adjusts. These requirements have historically limited direct mining participation to specialized operators, effectively excluding the vast majority of institutional capital from the sector. The OMN structure converts the economic output of large-scale mining operations into a financial instrument that can be held in a portfolio alongside traditional assets, evaluated using familiar fixed-income analytical frameworks, and transferred between approved parties via blockchain without any of the underlying operational responsibilities.
8. Future Plans Include Collateral Use Cases
Looking ahead, Apex and Omnes have indicated that future iterations of the OMN may allow tokenized notes to be used as collateral within lending and borrowing protocols. If implemented, this would enable institutional holders to pledge their mining-backed notes to secure financing without liquidating the underlying position — a capability that would significantly enhance the product's capital efficiency and utility within the broader decentralized finance ecosystem. Collateralization of tokenized real-world assets is an area of active development across the industry, with several protocols already supporting lending against tokenized treasuries, real estate, and other asset classes. Extending this functionality to a hashrate-backed instrument would represent a further convergence between traditional structured finance and onchain capital markets.
9. The Tokenized Real-World Asset Market Continues to Expand
The OMN launch arrives at a moment of rapid growth for the tokenized real-world asset sector. According to data from DeFiLlama, the total onchain market capitalization of tokenized RWAs on public blockchains reached approximately $23.6 billion as of mid-March 2026, representing a 66% increase since the beginning of the year. The category encompasses a diverse range of assets including government bonds, private credit, equities, real estate, and commodities that have been represented as blockchain tokens. Major financial institutions including BlackRock, Fidelity, and Franklin Templeton have introduced tokenized fund products in recent years, and industry projections for the sector's long-term potential range from McKinsey's estimate of $2 trillion by 2030 to BCG and Ripple's forecast of $18.9 trillion by 2033. The OMN adds a new subcategory to this expanding market by representing industrial infrastructure — specifically Bitcoin mining capacity — as a tokenized financial product.
10. Bridging Industrial Infrastructure and Onchain Finance
The Omnes Mining Note represents a conceptual bridge between two worlds that have traditionally operated in parallel: the physical infrastructure of Bitcoin mining and the digital infrastructure of tokenized capital markets. By packaging hashrate into a structured debt note and issuing it on a regulated blockchain platform, Apex and Omnes are testing the proposition that institutional investors will accept industrial mining operations as the backing for a financial instrument — much as they already accept real estate, receivables, or equipment leases as collateral for traditional structured products. If the model proves successful, it could open the door to a broader category of tokenized infrastructure assets, where the productive capacity of physical systems — not just their output or the assets they produce — becomes directly investable through onchain instruments. For the Bitcoin mining industry, which is currently under severe economic pressure with prices well below average production costs, the ability to raise capital through structured notes backed by hashrate could provide an alternative funding mechanism during periods when spot market conditions make traditional financing more difficult to secure.