Jp Morgan, the bank run by Jamie Dimon is launching its own cryptocurrency. JP Morgan has $2.6 trillion in assets, $100 billion annual revenue, it moves more than $5 trillion in wholesale payments every single day and a quarter million employees. It is used by the investment banking crowd, asset management crowd, private banking, private wealth management, and the treasury & security services division. This tells us exactly for whom the JP Morgan Coin is designed for. These are the organizations that are going to be using it. The JPM Coin is a centralized permissioned censorable blockchain based liquidity tool. Many people are even saying that it should not be considered to be a cryptocurrency and it is just a bank coin.
The JP Morgan Coin:
The JP Morgan Coin is designed to be a stablecoin. They will be starting off with the USD and will be expanding to other key currencies over time. So it will be a global currency within their permission network. It will be providing real-time gross settlements rather than waiting for days for the payments to get cleared. The network participants can transfer tokenized fiat instantly, constantly and with full finality 24X7 which is a major improvement to how the things work currently. The previous model apart from bringing slow was also more prone to fraud and exposed to the old central bank failure and required multiple intermediaries across the interbank network.
The main use cases for the JP Morgan Coin will be international payments for sizeable corporate clients circumventing SWIFT and circumventing XRP. JP Morgan Coin may also be used for securities transactions. JP Morgan has previously tested a debt issuance on the blockchain and the token will allow institutional investors to buy debt issuance. Corporations could also use the JP Morgan treasury in order to take the place of their dollar holdings in their subsidiaries all over the world which will open more ways for the big corporate clients in order to move money back and forth.
The JP Morgan Coin will be on the quorum blockchain which is a permissioned version of Ethereum which JP Morgan has been using for some time. The quorum blockchain has already seen institutional use cases. Financial institutions can trust that only authorized parties can join their private ethereum network and that the transactions will be confidential. So the JP Morgan Coin is probably for a very small group of elites.
The History of JP Morgan:
There are dozens of fines that JP Morgan pays yearly all around the world for doing basically the same kind of things.
JP Morgan was fined $65 million for trying to vague the benchmark rate.
They were fined $1.6 million for failing to meet anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing laws in Hong Kong.
Citigroup and JP Morgan both had to pay a combined total of $182.5 million after being accused of violating anti-trust laws. Citigroup and JP Morgan allegedly the European Interbank offered rate.
JP Mogan was $135 million for improper handling of American Depositary Receipts.
In most of these cases, they are not actually found guilty of anything and they just settle. They don’t end up breaking any laws cause they just pay the huge amount of fine they are asked to pay.
After the announcement of the JP Morgan Coin, JP Morgan stocks have gone up because of JP Morgan’s clients, this is a welcome sign of innovation.
JP Morgan Coin vs XRP:
It seems that some banks want their own coin and not XRP which is the supposed to be the banker’s coin. They really don’t want XRP for one reason or the other. Although banks would not want to use the JP Morgan Coin as such they might just have their own coins in future such as Bank of America Coin or Bank of China Coin etc. But we have an interesting situation when it comes down to exchanging value between these banks because XRP is essentially a public ledger vs the JP Morgan Coin which is private. XRP has a permissionless ledger vs JP Morgan Coin has a permission ledger. JP Morgan controls the JP Morgan Coin but they do not control the XRP ledger and remember that the banks like to have control and maybe the other banks are also going to think like JP Morgan but there is still a lot of hope for XRP. JP Morgan Coin may not see very much interoperability between banks, therefore, they might need some kind of bridge and that bridge could end up being XRP.
Implications for Bitcoin:
There are not many implications for bitcoin at all. Most of the bitcoin enthusiasts have zero interest in things like the JP Morgan Coin. Bitcoin has amazing and unique value propositions and this is not a threat in any way to bitcoin. JP Morgan cannot control bitcoin it is really hard to manipulate the price of bitcoin whereas in case of JP Morgan Coin, they have direct control over it. The current rumors say that JP Morgan is going to use Bakkt for their clients who want to purchase, invest and hold bitcoin. So the JP Morgan Coin doesn’t have threat on bitcoin. Bitcoin is always superior in every way.