No longer fraud? JPMorgan launching crypto for payments business

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First, they called Bitcoin a “fraud.” Now, JPMorgan Chase is about to become the first U.S. multinational bank to roll out a cryptocurrency that will be used to “instantly settle payments between clients,” CNBC reported.

The digital token is called the JPM Coin, and has a similar concept as stablecoins in that it is pegged to the U.S. dollar. Clients—only limited to corporations, banks and broker-dealers—can get a hold of the coin after depositing dollars at the bank. Tokens that are used, either for payments or buying securities on the blockchain, will be destroyed and JPMorgan will give its clients “a commensurate number of dollars,” according to the report.

JPMorgan has come a long way from 2017, when its CEO Jamie Morgan went on a tirade, called Bitcoin a “fraud” that would eventually “blow up,” and threatened to fire any employee who will trade the cryptocurrency. The New York-based bank has apparently seen the error of its chief’s ways, and has since made moves to embrace blockchain and cryptocurrency—consistently saying that blockchain and regulated cryptos hold promise, as well as filing patents for a blockchain-based network payments and for virtual receipts management.

Umar Farooq, head of blockchain projects at JPMorgan, told CNBC that the technology’s use cases “are frankly quite endless,” noting that “anything that currently exists in the world, as that moves onto the blockchain, this would be the payment leg for that transaction.”

The JPM Coin is described as the one of the first real world applications for crypto in the banking sector. For now, Farooq outlines three early applications for the bank’s digital token: international payments for large corporate clients, securities transactions, and for businesses that utilizes the bank’s treasury services “to replace the dollars they hold in subsidiaries across the world.”

In the future, Farooq expects that the coin will be used for payments on Internet-connected devices. But for now, the focus is on big corporations. He explains, “Pretty much every big corporation is our client, and most of the major banks in the world are, too. Even if this was limited to JPM clients at the institutional level, it shouldn’t hold us back.”

While you’re at it, JPMorgan, why not take a look at the features of Bitcoin SV? It is, after all, the only blockchain that all enterprises should build upon given that it has a stable protocol, massively scalable network, a regulation-friendly mindset, and the only network to date the uses a professionalized approach to security.

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