J.P. Morgan is coming out with a timeline for its pending “JPM coin” stablecoin.
A Bloomberg report today suggests that the mammoth U.S. bank is going to have its coin online by the end of the year.
“JPMorgan Chase & Co. is seeing interest from clients in the U.S., Europe and Japan on the potential for its prototype digital coin,” write Takashi Nakamichi and Takako Taniguchi in a story that suggests 2019 will be the year of the JPM coin (or at least the year of its launch).
One thing that interested parties are looking at, the authors say, is the capability of a J.P. Morgan stablecoin to speed up securities and enhance bond transactions.
Citing the “instant” delivery of bonds, Umar Farooq, head of digital treasury services and blockchain at JPMorgan, is quoted here and elsewhere saying digital innovation is likely to proceed at a rapid pace.
“We believe that a lot of securities over time, in five to 20 years, will increasingly become digital or get tokenized,” Farooq said.
One of the delicious ironies for Bitcoin enthusiasts is all of the words that J.P. Morgan head honcho Jamie Dimon will have to eat: throughout the last few years, until relatively recently, Dimon had been negging crypto buyers, flat out contending that coins have no value, etc.
Here’s just one example of a panoply of negative crypto quotes attributed to Dimon throughout the past few years:
“If you’re stupid enough to buy it, you’ll pay the price for it one day … The only value of Bitcoin is what the other guy’ll pay for it…Honestly I think there’s a good chance of the buyers out there are out there jazzing it up every day so that maybe you’ll buy it too, and take them out.”
But while it may be tempting to focus on Jamie Dimon’s about-face, there are still significant questions about the nature of J.P. Morgan’s coin – as a proprietary stablecoin, it may not be decentralized in the way that blockchain fans would like it to be.
Many experts argue that the lack of a decentralized consensus model means these coins are not true cryptocurrencies, but rather, branded offerings in walled gardens where institutional holders can control prices, transactions and more.
Apparently, we’ll only have about half a year to wait to find out.
