Today JP Morgan’s Takis Georgakopoulos told Bloomberg that JPM Coin is used for $1 billion transactions daily. The world’s largest bank started trialing the blockchain instant payments solution in 2019. It’s primarily deployed by institutions and large corporates such as Siemens treasury, which uses tokenized deposits to move money between its subsidiaries worldwide and 24/7.
The bank also has a blockchain intraday repo platform and a new tokenized collateral management network. We’d speculate that settlement on those platforms accounts for a large proportion of JPM Coin transactions. By June, the repo solution had processed $300 billion in trades.
Initially JPM Coin was only for dollar payments, but added euros in June. Georgakopoulos mentioned further expansion is on the cards. That could be related to the recent news that Bahrain’s ABC Bank had soft launched the JP Morgan Coin Systems solution. It started using the solution for payments beween Bahrain and the US, UK, Singapore and Hong Kong. Additionally, the UAE’s FAB recently completed a pilot but has not yet committed.
To date the bank has primarily explored wholesale and B2B blockchain solutions. But it sounds like that might change. Georgakopoulos told Bloomberg that for digital deposit tokens the “next step in that journey is to think about how you can create a more retail version of that, so that you can bring that same efficiency to consumers.”
JP Morgan likes to describe JPM Coin as a blockchain-based bank account. Funds are moved into a separate bank account where the deposits are tokenized, with the reverse happening on the receiving end.
The bank views digital payment solutions in three buckets: an internal ledger, a shared ledger, and a universal ledger. There are blockchain-based bank accounts like JPM Coin. Next, JP Morgan co-founded Partior, a permissioned interbank network for multi-currency payments. DBS Bank, Temasek and Standard Chartered were co-founders. Thirdly, it’s involved in deposit token trials on public blockchain as part of a Monetary Authority of Singapore project.
We’re soon to launch a report on blockchain-based bank payments. Sign up to get notified when it’s available.
