During the JP Morgan Chase quarterly earnings call on Friday, CFO Jennifer Piepszak highlighted that the JPM Coin tokenizes customers’ deposits on a private blockchain to make payments easier. She distanced JPM Coin from public blockchain stablecoins, where the OCC recently provided a guidance letter that said banks could host nodes for these stablecoins.
Referring to the OCC guidance, she said, “That doesn’t impact JPM coin.” She was a little reserved in her comments about the JPM Coin. “It’s obviously very early. We will assess use cases and customer demand. But it’s still too early to see where this goes for us,” she said.
Additionally, an analyst asked about Facebook’s Libra, now rebranded to Diem. In his response, CEO Jamie Dimon said he expects central banks will have digital currencies and “it may not change our world that much.”
In terms of global stablecoins, he pointed to the need for a level playing field. “Some of these competitors who want to do it (stablecoins), they want to be in payments. They want the payments data. They want to move the money. Again, it’s going to be a regulatory issue about what that means,” said Dimon.
“As long as we can do the same thing that the competition can do, then it’s hard to argue that it’s unfair.”
JP Morgan previously revealed that it has a large customer using the JPM Coin in production. And it is working on wholesale multicurrency payments infrastructure in Singapore with DBS Bank and Singaporean state-owned investment company Temasek. The decentralized financial market infrastructure (DFMI) is a commercialization of the central bank work on Project Ubin and has the endorsement of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).
