I’m not interested in Bitcoin, but my clients are, so I’m offering it to them: these are more or less the words used by Jamie Dimon, CEO of the JPMorgan bank.
He did so during an interview with the Wall Street Journal, confirming once again that he is a crypto sceptic. These words reveal that although JPMorgan has opened up to cryptocurrencies, the CEO has not changed his mind.
In 2017, at the height of the speculative bubble, Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin a scam and threatened to fire bank employees caught trading cryptocurrencies. A few months later he regretted calling it that, but said he was not interested.
To the Wall Street Journal he instead stated:
“I’m not a bitcoin supporter. I don’t care about bitcoin. I have no interest in it. On the other hand, clients are interested, and I don’t tell clients what to do”.
Jamie Dimon: no to Bitcoin, yes to blockchain
In the past few days, news had circulated that the bank was launching a fund to allow customers to invest in Bitcoin. Considering the positions of the CEO, this was a real turning point for the bank. Now Jamie Dimon seems to confirm this theory.
Indeed, thanks to the rising price of Bitcoin, institutional investors are also becoming interested in cryptocurrency and are looking for trading instruments that suit their interests and guarantee security.
JPMorgan is one of those institutions attempting to address this need.
However, Jamie Dimon continues to maintain his misgivings about the nature of Bitcoin:
“Blockchain is real. We use it,” according to Dimon. “But people have to remember that a currency is supported by the taxing authority of a country, the rule of law, a central bank”.
The fact that JPMorgan likes blockchain is demonstrated by the fact that the bank has long been studying its own cryptocurrency, JPM Coin, which is based on blockchain. In fact, after announcements and testing in 2019, the project seems to have stalled. JPM Coin is supposed to be a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar, to be used in particular for cross-border payments. But it has not been heard of for a long time.