Alibaba & JPMorgan Shock Markets: Tokenized Payments Go Live Before 2026

Two giants just rewrote the rulebook. Alibaba and JPMorgan—normally fierce competitors—are launching a blockchain-powered payment system by December 2025. This isn’t some vague "future of finance" press release. It’s happening now.

Wall Street meets Web3: The partnership combines Alibaba’s e-commerce dominance with JPMorgan’s Onyx blockchain platform. Tokenized commercial transactions will settle instantly, cutting out legacy banking delays. (Finally, a use case beyond NFT monkey jpegs.)

Why this matters: When traditional finance and tech titans collaborate on blockchain, regulators pay attention. The system could process billions in B2B payments daily—assuming the banks don’t strangle it with fees first.

Bottom line: The 2025 deadline proves institutional adoption isn’t slowing down. Whether this becomes the new standard or another "blockchain solution" collecting dust remains to be seen. After all, remember when everyone thought Libra would change everything?

Alibaba is getting ready to shake up global B2B payments, and it’s doing it with JPMorgan’s blockchain technology.

The company plans to launch a tokenized payment network by December, aiming to fix one of global trade’s biggest problems: slow, expensive cross-border transactions.

A Tokenized Push to Speed Up Global Trade

Kuo Zhang, president of Alibaba.com, told CNBC that the company is building a settlement system based on tokenized USD and EUR – something that works “stablecoin-like,” but is backed by real bank deposits. The goal is to make payments feel seamless, no matter where the buyer or supplier is based.

“We feel the urgency that we need to use AI to redesign how people do global trade” Zhang said. “We think it’s going to be a paradigm shift for e-commerce for B2B”

Alibaba wants to solve the classic pain points in B2B trade – multi-currency delays, long settlement windows, and high fees. Today, payments can be stuck for 48 to 72 hours, which is a problem tokenizing deposits can solve.

The company is also rolling out Agentic Pay, a new payment rail that uses AI to automatically turn chat discussions between buyers and suppliers into contracts. 

JPMorgan’s Blockchain Becomes the Backbone

To power this upgrade, Alibaba is tapping JPMorgan’s tokenization unit, Kinexys. 

The timing is interesting too. JPMorgan already moves around $2 billion in tokenized transactions every day and just two days before launched its deposit token on Base.

This partnership brings two heavyweights together: Alibaba on the global commerce side, and JPMorgan as the bank that is set to become one of the strongest players in real-world blockchain payments.

A Real Test for Tokenized Payments

If Alibaba hits its December timeline, this could become one of the largest real-world deployments of tokenized money in global trade. Analysts expect billions in annual settlement volume to eventually MOVE through the system.