(Oct 19): JPMorgan Chase & Co is launching its deposit token on ethereum, extending the lender’s push into blockchain payments as Wall Street grows more comfortable moving money on public networks.

JPM Coin — which represents US dollar deposits at the largest US bank — will be made available to the company’s institutional clients on the ethereum network, JPMorgan said in a statement on Monday. First launched last year on Coinbase Global Inc-affiliated blockchain base, the deposit token allows clients to send and receive money in seconds and 24/7, rather than over several days and only during working hours.

The bank expects JPM Coin to be used by large clients in the cryptocurrency sector seeking a way to make payments on blockchain, as well as financial institutions that need a form of digital cash to settle or collateralise transactions of tokenised assets, Emma Landriault, global head of Kinexys Labs at JPMorgan’s blockchain division Kinexys, said in an interview. 

Tokenisation allows traditional assets such as stocks, bonds and funds to be represented and transferred via blockchain networks. While banks have spent more than a decade exploring the technology’s potential, a lot of the work to date has focused on private networks, where access is restricted and banks retain greater control over participants. 

Moving onto public infrastructure — albeit with limits on who can hold the tokens — brings Wall Street closer to the crypto ecosystem, enabling them to tap into existing pools of liquidity and developer activity.

“We’ve clearly been in a year of further convergence between Wall Street and crypto,” Landriault said. “It’s not just Wall Street going to public chains, but the institutional web3 players getting more embedded and partnering with traditional financial institutions.” JPM Coin’s move onto ethereum underscores that shift, she added.

The bank chose to bring the token to ethereum because of its liquidity and existing use among clients, Landriault said. Ethereum is the largest blockchain by the total value of assets locked into it, with about US$50 billion (RM204 billion) deposited in applications running on the network, according to DefiLlama data.

JPMorgan’s expansion comes as banks and other large financial firms seek ways to move assets faster and beyond the limitations of traditional systems by using crypto’s underlying technology. A company backed by more than 100 corporations including Visa Inc, Stripe Inc, and Mastercard Inc issued a US dollar-pegged stablecoin last month, another form of digital money.

JPMorgan is one of the more active banks in blockchain development. It also runs the Kinexys Blockchain Deposit Account network, which allows corporate clients to move dollars, euros, pounds and several other currencies, on the bank’s private blockchain. The network processes more than US$7 billion in transactions a day, JPMorgan said, a sliver of the roughly US$12 trillion a day its broader payments division handles daily.

Uploaded by Evelyn Chan