JP Morgan Chase – a symbol of monetary ancien regime – is going issue the first cryptocurrency backed by a US bank. JP Morgan is responsible for wholesale financial services. The company moves from $5 to $6 trillion every day for corporate clients.
The JPM Coin will be used to settle wholesale clients’ transactions. The bank is planning a trial project when only a small part of the transfers will be served with the cryptocurrency.
Hearing the news the cryptocurrency community has its laugh at the conservative JP Morgan, since not so long ago the bank’s CEO Jamie Dimon has publicly criticized blockchain-based currencies calling bitcoin “a fraud”.
JPM Coin is going to be quite different from Bitcoin. Probably no individual will ever own one. One JPM Coin is redeemable for one USD. This makes JP Morgan’s coin more similar to stablecoins.
JP Morgan’s clients can deposit fiat money and perform transactions using JPM Coins and blockchain technology. In the next step, the coin is destroyed and the money is paid to the client.
JP Morgan is a giant, and its clients are the most influential business people in the world. Introducing cryptocurrency solutions to their system is a great step towards bringing in the crypto to the corporate mainstream.
JP Morgan is going to conduct the test with a small sample of clients for a few weeks. Then they will move the product to a wider base.
If the idea stands the test it is almost certain that other institutions will follow JP Morgan’s experience.
“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,” said Umar Farooq, head of J.P. Morgan’s blockchain projects.
Umar Fraooq described three possible uses of JPM Coin:
- Real-time international payments (as an alternative to Swift)
- Securities transactions that would allow instant settlements
- Treasury services for the biggest corporations.
“Money sloshes back and forth all over the world in a large enterprise,” “Is there a way to ensure that a subsidiary can represent cash on the balance sheet without having to actually wire it to the unit? That way, they can consolidate their money and probably get better rates for it.” said Farooq.
JP Morgan provides banking services to 80 percent of the Fortune 500 companies. Introducing the cryptocurrency concept to these clients can prove to be revolutionary for the perception of blockchain and crypto industry among the business leaders in the US.
