A United States banking first is upon us with one of the country’s top banking giants, JPMorgan Chase (JPM) launching its own crypto-currency, as reported by CNBC on February 14.
The US banking giant is set to popularize its own coin dubbed “JPM Coin”. In a move that some commentators may see as unlikely, the multi-national lender will use its newly developed crypto asset to boost settlement efficiency within three of its operations initially.
The leader of JPM’s blockchain focus, Umar Farooq, expressed the following views while in an interview with CNBC;
“So anything that currently exists in the world, as that moves onto the blockchain, this would be the payment leg for that transaction,”
He went to highlight that;
“The applications are frankly quite endless; anything where you have a distributed ledger which involves corporations or institutions can use this.”
JPMorgan’s token “JPM Coin” will initially focus on cross-border settlements by major corporations by helping speed up transaction speeds which currently take a day or longer if you go for extant options such as SWIFT.
Treasury services and securities transactions will also benefit with the release of JPM Coin and Farooq added that the crypto will expand further if it becomes a success. Farooq explained that only a small amount of the total funds involved in the three areas of transaction speeds, treasury services and securities transactions, would involve JPM Coin at first.
He further stated that;
“Even if this was limited to JPM clients at the institutional level, it shouldn’t hold us back,”
The release of JPM Coin is such a wonder for many since the banking giant’s CEO Jamie Dixon, openly called Bitcoin a “fraud” back in mid-2017. Though he later refuted his comments while talking to crypto publication Cointelegraph at the World Economic Forum, his earlier comments had stuck in the minds of many.
This about-turn stance by JPMorgan is definitely indicative of an acknowledgement of the Blockchain and virtual currencies by some of the biggest financial authorities in the world. With financial giants such as JPMorgan and the New York stock exchange (NYSE) all looking at the Blockchain, it tells you that the institutional adoption tide is slowly building up.
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