JPMorgan CEO Dimon says bank will pursue stablecoins, even as he questions their appeal

Longtime crypto skeptic Jamie Dimon isn't exactly embracing crypto, but he’s acknowledging that Wall Street can no longer ignore it.

"We’re going to be involved in both JPMorgan deposit coin and stablecoins to understand it, to be good at it,” the JPMorgan Chase CEO said during an earnings call on Tuesday, according to CNBC. “I think they’re real, but I don’t know why you’d want to [use a] stablecoin as opposed to just payment."

Dimon's statements come about a month after it was revealed that JPMorgan Chase, the world's largest bank, planned to pilot a stablecoin-like blockchain-based asset called JPMD, a token that will launch on the Coinbase-incubated Layer 2 network Base. 

Although the bank is developing the JPMD token and Dimon has previously said JPMorgan Chase is “probably one of the bigger users of blockchain," the CEO's comments do, in a way, echo how far the thinking has come among traditional financial institutions. 

In less than two years, much of Wall Street has changed its tune when it comes to crypto. BlackRock has a spot Bitcoin ETF with tens of billions of dollars in assets under management, a mark it has achieved at an impressive rate. Through its funds, Vanguard is the largest shareholder in Strategy, a technology company that appears to be focused only on accumulating Bitcoin in order to grow shareholder value.

JPMorgan token

JPMorgan is calling JPMD a "permissioned" deposit token that will represent commercial bank holdings. The bank's pilot program is expected to run for several months and will likely include the bank's institutional clients.

Naveen Mallela, the global co-head of JPMorgan's blockchain unit Kinexys, has said that institutions could use JPMD for onchain digital asset settlement and cross-border business-to-business transactions.

On the Bitcoin front, as both governments and corporations are buying up the cryptocurrency, Dimon said in May that JPMorgan would allow clients to buy BTC, but would not hold the digital asset in custody.

Previously, Dimon has not only said that Bitcoin has no value, but he even referred to it as a Ponzi scheme as recently as this January.

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