JPMorgan’s decision to launch its own cryptocurrency, called JPMorgan Coin (JPM), has caused a furor in the cryptocommunity, which have slammed it for various reasons. Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan’s CEO, has himself said several things about Bitcoin, once calling it a fraud, and then only a few months later backtracking and regretting the statement.
With JPMorgan’s enthusiasm for blockchain and digital asset now quite clear, Dimon said that the JPM Coin, which was initially described as a coin for internal purposes, could be extended to several other uses cases, including retail:
JP Morgan Coin could be internal, could be commercial, it could one day be consumer, Dimon said
However, there is no official announcement as to whether individuals will be able to use the coin; it currently remains just a possibility.
The JPM Coin has been described as one that will help clients of its wholesale payments business settle payments, especially for cross-border transactions which are expensive and time consuming.
Umar Farooq, head of JPMorgan’s blockchain projects, said of the token:
So anything that currently exists in the world, as that moves onto the blockchain, this would be the payment leg for that transaction. The applications are frankly quite endless; anything where you have a distributed ledger which involves corporations or institutions can use this.
Recently, the CEO of Bitcoin-based financial mobile application Abra, Bill Barhydt, said that JPM Coin and other enterprise blockchains are going to fail miserably, comparing it the dot-com bubble when “extranets” were touted.
In any case, it will be interesting to see how the JPM Coin fares as the crypto market loses the hype that it was once plagued with, and as public blockchains work on the scaling solutions and other technological developments that allow them to work on a global scale.
