Global financial services company JP Morgan is planning to pilot its own cryptocurrency by the end of the year.
In February of this year, JP Morgan announced that it created and successfully tested a stablecoin, called JPM Coin, that enables instantaneous transfer of payments between institutional clients. The company said that the JPM Coin will be issued on Quorum Blockchain and subsequently extended to other platforms. It will also be operable on all standard blockchain networks.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg Japan, Umar Farooq, head of digital treasury services and blockchain at JPMorgan, revealed that the firm could start pilot testing JPM Coin with selected clients by the end of this year, subject to regulatory approvals. Farooq said that the goal of the pilot is to speed up transactions, such as payments between firms and bond transactions.
“JPM Coin could enable instant delivery of bonds on a blockchain platform,” Farooq said. “We believe that a lot of securities over time, in five to 20 years, will increasingly become digital or get tokenized.”
Despite the bank’s CEO Jamie Dimon calling bitcoin a fraud in 2017, JP Morgan has always believed in the potential of blockchain technology and supports cryptocurrencies as long as they are properly controlled and regulated.
“We believe that JPM Coin can yield significant benefits for blockchain applications by reducing clients’ counterparty and settlement risk, decreasing capital requirements and enabling instant value transfer,” the bank said.
