For those who follow Crypto Twitter, it’s been a really big week. Thursday’s announcement of JPMorgan’s new cryptocurrency had analysts and enthusiasts alike all atwitter, with many in the crypto community weighing in with nuanced opinions regarding the announcement. Of course, the backstory is that the crypto world has no love for Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan Chase head—and one of the most prominently involve figures in the financial crisis of 2007. The crypto announcement on behalf of JPMorgan plays into a strange narrative featuring Dimon. After all, he has famously been a Bitcoin bear, to put it mildly. Back in 2017, Dimon went as far as to refer to Bitcoin as a fraud—and joked that any JPMorgan employee found trading it would be fired for stupidity.
Fast-forward less than two years, and JPMorgan introduces its very own digital token. And that’s not all—the institution also put out Quorom, which is a blockchain platform now used by many banks to monitor transactions and record them. And with its shiny new token, the big financial institution has seen a way to serve up crypto to its typically conservative consumers. JPMorgan has even hired staffers specifically to work on blockchain initiatives, revealing a much more bullish perspective than the company has been willing to show publicly.
Since this token will be tied to American currency, it will be considered a stablecoin. According to CNBC, this means that it will not be held hostage to the same wild swings that crypto has famously experienced over the past decade. However, many in the crypto world argue that there’s no point of a cryptocurrency that is centralized and regulated. For a lot of people in crypto, the freedom from a middleman is what defines crypto as superior to fiat currency.
However, it is important to note that JPMorgan’s planning for this this token is still in the very preliminary stages. It’s still in the testing phase, and early reports indicate that customers won’t be able to move the tokens out of the bank’s ecosystem for quite some time. Speed and transparency are two of the reasons why JPMorgan executives believe that this could be a good move for them. After all, one of the downfalls of the banking system as we know it is that wire transfers can take a really long time. Blockchain makes this so much faster than even Jamie Dimon can’t criticize it.
