JP Morgan is talking about its own stablecoin. Meanwhile, Bitcoin is celebrating a triumphant advance in the markets. The “JPM Coin” and the quorum blockchain have already started in 2019.
The US bank JP Morgan is causing an international stir. While its CEO Jamie Dimon was an outspoken critic of Bitcoin in previous years, the institute is apparently turning into a strong advocate of BTC. Just a few days ago, a report revealed that the bank Attributes very strong potential to Bitcoin and sees it in competition with gold.
But also the bank’s own crypto currency, which became known under the name JPM Coin, is brought up for discussion. This is a stablecoin that is issued on the quorum blockchain. Quorum was JP Morgan’s in-house blockchain project, which is in principle a private blockchain, which in turn is largely a copy of Ethereum and can optionally also be used publicly.
Quorum was only handed over from JPMorgan to ConsenSys in August 2020, and development is no longer in the hands of the bank alone. As CNBC reported, JP Morgan now apparently wants to revive its foray into blockchain with the Onyx project. The focus is on the project to make the JPM Coin attractive for payments between companies and banks. The bank guarantees coverage, because the corresponding amount in US dollars is deposited for each amount of JPM Coin issued.
JP Morgan pays record fine
Overall, the bank’s attempt to shine together with Bitcoin seems half-baked and more like a PR stunt. Because the bank had been manipulating the market in precious metals and government bonds for years, the CFTC ordered it to pay a record fine of 920 million US dollars in September.
The company let it be known that the responsible persons no longer work at the bank. In addition, they want to avoid such incidents in the future, but that doesn’t sound very credible when you consider that JP Morgan had to pay a fine of 135 million US dollars in 2018 for issuing so-called “phantom shares”.
Aside from the negative headlines about the bank’s behavior, its share price cannot convince either and is bathing with the rest of the market. It seems that one wants to adorn oneself with foreign feathers in order to give the impression of successful action.
JPM Coin in competition with XRP and CBDC
The market that JPM Coin and Onyx are targeting is in high demand. Ripple also wants to score with the further development of XRP and the expansion of partnerships in this field. But what is looming on the horizon as an ever greater threat to this sector are the first experiments with digital central bank money.
These CBDCs could make private stablecoins and cryptocurrencies superfluous as centralized solutions and ensure that companies and banks prefer to use the state variant directly.
In the end, only Bitcoin remains as an alternative, because in this sense it is the only hard currency that cannot be controlled by anyone and, with its public blockchain, represents a counter-model to centralized stablecoins, CBDC and banknotes.