The CEO of JPMorgan Chase gave a shout out on Wednesday to stablecoins, one of the buzziest sectors in the crypto. “I’m a believer in stablecoins, believer in blockchain, not personally, a believer in Bitcoin itself,” Jamie Dimon said in an interview with CNBC.
He added that his bank “will have” a stablecoin, or cryptocurrency pegged to underlying assets like the U.S. dollar. “There are things that stablecoins maybe can do that your traditional cash can’t,” Dimon said, adding later: “It’s what the customer wants. It’s not what JPMorgan personally wants.”
Dimon has long drawn a distinction between the technology of blockchain, or decentralized ledgers, and Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency. His Wednesday comments with CNBC are in line with his prior thinking, but his disavowal of Bitcoin was softer than his previous takedowns.
In 2017, he said that he would fire JPMorgan Chase employees who were trading Bitcoin because it was evidence that they were “stupid.” In 2023, he said Bitcoin was “hyped-up fraud,” compared the token to a “pet rock,” and said that cryptocurrencies are a “waste of time.” Still, he conceded that blockchains were useful.
“Blockchain is a technology ledger system that we use to move information. We’ve used it to do overnight repo, intraday repo, we’ve used it to move money, right? So that’s a technology ledger that we think will be deployable,” he said.
Dimon heads the largest bank in the U.S and his comments on stablecoins add further legitimacy to the fast-growing crypto industry, especially after the landmark passage of GENIUS Act in Congress, a bill that regulates stablecoins.
JPMorgan Chase has long had its own blockchain division. The team, originally called Onyx, has rebranded to Kinexys and has started to expand beyond the bank’s “walled garden,” an industry term for blockchains that are private.
In May, the bank settled its first transaction on a public blockchain. And, in June, Kinexys announced that it was piloting what it called JPMD, a stablecoin-like asset known as a tokenized deposit. The token will represent a dollar of deposits into JPMorgan Chase.
