J.P. Morgan announced its JPM Coin is live on Ethereum mainnet.
J.P. Morgan has officially expanded its deposit token outside of the initial Layer 2 launch on Base network, which made its debut back in Q4 of last year. There is now more momentum to scale.
The bank’s view is that there will be a need for credible digital cash, in this case the JPM Coin, which it considers safer than existing USD stablecoins, as this represents liabilities on its balance sheet.
It is also a nuanced hedge against today’s tokenized deposit networks, which are slowly forming.
J.P. Morgan and Digital Assets
J.P. Morgan has been watching where the puck is heading for quite some time now.
One of the largest banks in the world has been following the blockchain and digital asset take-off since Bitcoin and Ethereum became popular around the 2014-2016 cycle.
Forward to today, it has the Kinexys platform using a proprietary bank ledger settlement system, showing that it is ready for the age of tokenization and onchain FX.
In fact, since its launch, Kinexys has processed $3T in volumes.
A challenge this year was to understand the narrative happening in the U.S., as the fate of the Clarity Act was unclear until it ultimately failed to pass in the Senate in September.
In its build-up, J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon was fairly outspoken about the risk of stablecoin yields as a counter Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong.
Tokenized Money Markets
At the same time, many large investment managers and banks turned to their own tokenized money market funds. BlackRock launched several in August alone.
Wisdom Tree, Fidelity, Federated Hermes, State Street, Goldman Sachs, and Franklin Templeton are all already eyeing the business of stablecoin issuers and managing stablecoin reserves.
Similarly, in May, J.P. Morgan launched a tokenized money market fund itself with whitelisted wallet addresses for withdrawal and USDC stablecoin integration.
