Its Offical, JPMorgan Has its Own Cryptocurrency! Does Its CEO Still Hate Bitcoin, Though?
Major U.S. bank JPMorgan Chase has made financial and technological history by unveiling its own PRIVATE cryptocurrency and becoming the first U.S.-based financial institution to create its own digital asset.
First reported by CNBC and officially announced on the mega-bank’s Website, the new cryptocurrency, JPM Coin, will begin trials in the coming months using ”a tiny fraction“ of the $6 trillion moved by the institution each day.
It’s been known by many for quite some time that JPMorgan has been looking at blockchain technology and developing a private ledger similar to that of Ethereum’s.
CEO Jamie Dimon has been deemed a villain by the crypto community for his statements towards Bitcoin, labeling it a “fraud” in 2017 and triggering a temporary market crash in the aftermath…
“if you’re stupid enough to buy it, you’ll pay the price one day.” – Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan.
Despite this, the famous Wall Street banker has always expressed interest in the underlying technology of the blockchain and its potentially disruptive capacity; pundits believe this was a deliberate effort to push prices of cryptocurrencies lower.
What Do We Know About JPM Coin?
As stated earlier, JPMorgan has been developing a blockchain similar to Ethereum. Unlike most other stablecoins, JPM Coin is not an ERC-20 token on Ethereum’s network. Instead, it will be issued on their own “enterprise“ blockchain system, Quorum.
JPMorgan’s head of blockchain operations, Umar Farooq, stated that “the applications are frankly quite endless; anything where you have a distributed ledger which involves corporations or institutions can use this.”
According to Farooq, there are three primary use cases for JPM Coin:
- International payments
- Securities transactions
- Unseen operations, corporations using JPMorgan’s treasury services
The new banker-backed cryptocurrency will be a stablecoin that is pegged to USD at a ratio of 1:1. Although rival cryptocurrencies like BTC, USDt, and XRP are public, JPM will be held in designated accounts that are authorized by JPMorgan itself.
This will grant selected institutions the ability to redeem the cryptocurrency for real U.S. dollars instantly after payments are received, as well as greater data efficiency and improving payment settlement times.
Source: https://www.jpmorgan.com/global/news/digital-coin-payments
Is Ripple Worried? Can the XRP Token Compete With JPM Coin?
San Francisco-based payment company Ripple has positioned itself as one of the leading blockchain-inspired companies in the sector, aiming at streamlining international payments through RippleNet and the XRP ledger.
With JPMorgan already being a key player in the financial sector and its JPM Coin providing similar services to that of Ripple and R3, many online speculators are wondering where this will leave Ripple and its future relevance.
Ripple CEO and cryptocurrency figure Brad Garlinghouse took to Twitter to share his insights on the new JPM Coin news…
Source: https://twitter.com/bgarlinghouse/status/1096118363506434048
Garlinghouse doesn’t seem too worried about the news, and he even makes a good point regarding financial institutions embracing cryptocurrencies.
Competition breeds innovation, and we could potentially witness the two “rival” digital ecosystems connect together as cryptocurrencies and distributed ledger technologies merge the world of global finance together.
This is not investment advice; please always do thorough research and only invest what you are willing to lose, especially in times of uncertainty.