Private versus public blockchain is the wrong debate.
The better question is: what does the transaction require?
J.P. Morgan appears to understand this better than most.
It is building private, permissioned infrastructure for activities such as:
- Bank-to-bank settlement
- Financing and collateral movements
- Fund administration and investor records
- Transactions between known counterparties
In these cases, control matters. The participants are identified institutions. The bank needs predictable performance, privacy, compliance controls and certainty over who can transact.
There is little commercial logic in moving an internal bank transaction into somebody else’s open ecosystem if the participants are already known.
But J.P. Morgan is also using public infrastructure.
Its JPMD deposit token has been launched on Base, a public Ethereum Layer 2 network. Its MONY money market fund is available on public Ethereum.
That is not a contradiction.
Public networks can provide:
- Broader distribution
- Greater interoperability
- Access to external investors and ecosystems
- 24/7 settlement
- A wider network effect
Private networks can provide:
- Counterparty control
- Privacy
- Permissioned access
- Regulatory and operational certainty
- A controlled environment for institutional workflows
The future is unlikely to be private or public.
It will be a combination of both, with assets, money and instructions moving between different networks through carefully designed control layers.
That is the important point.
Blockchain selection should be driven by the economic and regulatory requirements of the transaction, not by ideology.
For private-market assets, the same principle applies. Issuers may want broader distribution, but they may still need to control investor eligibility, transfer restrictions, settlement conditions and liquidity windows.
The winning architecture will not simply put everything on a public chain.
It will connect the right private and public rails, while preserving the controls that make regulated markets work.
Control where control is necessary. Openness where openness creates value.
That is the real opportunity in institutional tokenisation.