JPM Coin is coming to Ethereum: JPMorgan's dollar deposit token moves beyond Base

JPMorgan Chase plans to make JPM Coin, its token that represents US dollar deposits at the bank, available on Ethereum, Bloomberg reported on Monday 19 October. Until now the token, launched almost a year ago, has run on Base, the layer-2 network built by Coinbase. CoinDesk and Cointelegraph followed up the report.

What JPM Coin is

JPM Coin is a deposit token: each unit is a claim on a real dollar held at JPMorgan, not a stablecoin issued by a separate company. It is for institutional clients only, such as crypto firms making payments on a blockchain and financial firms settling trades or backing tokenised assets. Ordinary users cannot buy it.

Why Ethereum

Emma Landriault, who leads JPMorgan's Kinexys Labs, said Ethereum has more liquidity than rival networks and is already used by the bank's institutional clients. About $50 billion in crypto is locked in Ethereum-based applications, according to DeFiLlama. She did not give a launch date.

The numbers behind it

• Kinexys, JPMorgan's blockchain network, handles more than $7 billion a day.
• JPMorgan's payments business moves about $12 trillion a day, so blockchain is still a small slice.
• In January the bank said it would also take the token to the Canton Network, and in June it joined Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo and others in plans for a shared network for tokenised deposits.

What it means for readers in Pakistan

Nothing changes for retail users here directly: JPM Coin is not open to individuals anywhere, and it is not a coin you can buy on an exchange. The move does show where cross-border payments are heading, which matters for exporters and the remittance business. Ether's price in dollars, and its rupee value, is on our ETH price page; bitcoin is on the BTC page.