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JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has long been among the crypto sector’s most notable skeptics. Dimon vowed in 2017 to fire any JPMorgan trader who traded bitcoin and has called the oldest cryptocurrency a “fraud” and a “pet rock.” More recently, though, Dimon has become more open to the technology and, this week, he acknowledged that blockchain-based companies are now among his bank’s competitors.
In his annual shareholder letter published on Monday, Dimon said “a whole new set of competitors is emerging based on blockchain, which includes stablecoins, smart contracts and other forms of tokenization.”
Dimon added that JPMorgan will need to up its game to ward off competition from the upstarts, writing: “We need to roll out our own blockchain technology.”
JPMorgan has been quietly rolling out its own blockchain technology for several years now. The bank unveiled its JPM Coin running on a permissioned blockchain in 2019. More recently, its Kinexys blockchain unit has continued to expand into areas like tokenization and payments. JPMorgan has explored permissionless blockchains, too: The co-CEOs of Commercial and Investment Banking at the firm recently touted its involvement in the 2025 U.S. commercial paper issuance on Solana for Galaxy Digital Holdings.
Dimon’s views on crypto began to change in earnest last year. In July, he proclaimed himself to be a “believer in stablecoins” and, during the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in October, he reiterated that “blockchain is real” and predicted it would replace elements of the financial system. His latest comments underscore how the crypto sector has now become something else: a competitor to JPMorgan itself.
Awaiting clarity
Dimon’s latest comments on blockchain come as the bank has been sparring with the crypto industry in Washington, D.C. over a closely-watched piece of crypto legislation known as the CLARITY Act.
The bill would establish a U.S. regulatory framework for crypto, resolving long-running ambiguities involving the responsibilities of different financial regulators and registration criteria for crypto firms. Proponents of the law argue that clearer crypto rules can protect consumers while reversing a “regulation-by-enforcement” approach that has historically stifled crypto innovation in the U.S.
CLARITY passed the House but hit a snag in the Senate earlier this year over provisions that sought to make it harder for stablecoin issuers to offer rewards to holders. The GENIUS Act, a legislative framework for stablecoins passed in 2025, restricts stablecoin issuers from paying yield to holders. However, crypto exchanges such as Coinbase are able to custody stablecoins for issuers and pass along rewards to holders. Banks have lobbied Congress to close this “loophole,” arguing that yield-bearing stablecoins could be a potential substitute for bank deposits, which could significantly reduce banks’ deposit base.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong came out against a draft of CLARITY in January partly because, in Armstrong’s telling, banning stablecoin rewards allows banks to “ban their competition.” Coinbase earns a significant amount of revenue from USDC interest, and a ban on stablecoin rewards could presumably hurt the company’s bottom line. Amid the back-and-forth, Dimon reportedly accosted Armstrong at the World Economic Forum in Davos, telling the Coinbase CEO he’s “full of shit.”
In a Fox Business interview April 1, Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal said the banks and stablecoin companies are “very close to a deal.”
With more crypto-friendly regulators in charge under the Trump administration, companies in the crypto sector have lately shown a willingness to become more bank-like. A number of crypto firms have received conditional approval for a national trust banking charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. These bank charters, while somewhat narrow, enable crypto firms to do things like custody user assets.
As crypto competitors have become more formidable, JPMorgan has also bolstered its crypto functions. In an investor report penned Monday, the co-CEOs of the firm’s Commercial and Investment Banking division noted that transactions on JPMorgan’s blockchain-based products had grown thirtyfold since 2023.
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