Jamie Dimon, Chief Executive Officer of banking giant JPMorgan Chase, has revealed the is a possibility that the bank’s new digital asset, the JPM Coin, would be used by consumers, according to a report on news outlet CNBC. Dimon made the statement at JPMorgan Chase’s annual investor day, providing a possible radical change in the way the currency was initially developed to operate.
At a question-and-answer session on the day, Dimon said, “JPMorgan Coin could be internal, could be commercial, it could one day be consumer.”
The JPM Coin
The JPM Coin is the first bank-backed cryptocurrency in the United States, and it was developed by engineers at the New York-based JPMorgan Chase to speed up the way transaction settlements are being made.
The bank moves over $6 trillion in payments around the world daily on behalf of corporations that use its wholesale payment platform. The digital asset will be tested over the next few months with a tiny fraction of this settlement volume in order to check its effectiveness.
However, unlike other digital assets which are open-source, the JPM Coin was designed only to be accessible to the bank’s customers. Even at that, not all customers will have access to the coin.
Specifically, the JPM Coin was designed for cross-border transactions, with the aim of speeding up international transactions (which take more than a day using payment options like SWIFT). The bank’s website also revealed that the crypto is not being targeted at individual customers at the moment.
It reads:
JPM Coin is currently designed for business-to-business money movement flows, and because we are still in a testing phase, we don’t have plans to make this available to individuals at this stage. That said, the cost savings and efficiency benefits would extend to the end customers of our institutional clients.
If Dimon’s comments are anything to go by, there is a possibility that the JPM Coin would be used by customers as well. Dimon’s comments are sure to spark a lot of excitement among members of the crypto community, and for various reasons.
Dimon’s Crypto Romance and the Possibility of Wider Industry Adoption
At last, the famous Bitcoin-bashing boss of JP Morgan has finally accepted the reality of what that digital currencies stand for and how they can improve the efficiency of the traditional financial industry.
Back in mid-2017, Dimon, famously called Bitcoin a fraud, and posited that anyone who was “stupid enough” to invest in it would end up paying the price for it one day. For employees who invested or traded in cryptos, Dimon threatened to relieve them of their duties.
However, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, earlier this year, Dimon chose to take the high road when asked about the downturn that has affected the crypto market over the past couple of months.
Speaking in an interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, Dimon stated that he wasn’t going to glory in the accuracy of his predictions, particularly with the effect that the bear market has had on thousands of investors and crypto-based businesses all over the world.
His comments at the Forum, as well as the announcement of the JPM Coin, can only mean that Dimon and JPMorgan Chase have come to see that there is a possibility that digital assets have come to stay, and they could find some practical applications within the traditional financial industry.
It is also the hope of many that an open-source, customer-applicable JPM Coin will signal wider crypto adoption by institutions all over the American financial ecosystem.
