One of crypto’s most vocal critics is changing his tune. Jamie Dimon, the CEO and chair of JPMorgan Chase, has said for years that Bitcoin is no different from pet rocks, serving only scammers and money launderers. But as his bank experiments with digital asset ledgers, Dimon has come around to the technology, arguing on Tuesday that “blockchain is real.”
Speaking at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women summit in Washington, DC, Dimon argued that stablecoins and his bank’s own JPMorgan Deposit Token will have real-world use cases, but that the decentralized nature of blockchains makes it a challenge to get parties to agree on permissions and rules. Dimon said this is why JPMorgan’s version of blockchain is private, as opposed to Bitcoin or Ethereum, meaning it has total control of who uses the chain and how.
“It’s going to replace certain systems that we all use that are clunky or late or not 24/7,” Dimon said, citing the short term loans known as intraday repos as an example. But the noted crypto curmudgeon—who famously said in 2017 he’d “fire in a second” any JPMorgan employee trading Bitcoin—also made clear he views the technology as limited.
“It’s not the only thing that can fix it, and sometimes it’s a solution looking for a problem,” Dimon stated, arguing that blockchain won’t “replace everything.”
When asked about Bitcoin, he declined to comment about a subject that has become a lightning rod for one of the world’s most scrutinized CEOs. “Then that’s all I’m going to read about in the headlines,” Dimon joked. “Then I get death threats and sh*t like that.”
Created by the shadowy figure Satoshi Nakamoto in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Bitcoin began as a reaction against the growing power of Wall Street and big banks. But the sector has since expanded, and financial institutions have come to integrate distributed ledger technology in various operations. That includes JPMorgan, which is using its own private, permissioned blockchain, Kinexys, to facilitate money movement within its client base as well as developing its own internal token.
While these efforts have come in fits and starts, the Trump Administration’s pro-crypto bent has caused different Wall Street firms to move more quickly to launch their own products. This has produced a boom in stablecoins, or a type of cryptocurrency that’s pegged to an underlying asset, typically the U.S. dollar. Some banks have looked at stablecoins as an alternative form of money movement, with blockchains potentially reducing fees and processing times for transactions.
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