JP Morgan plans to be the first US bank with its own cryptocurrency

J.P. Morgan Chase plans to launch what is considered to be the first cryptocurrency backed by a major bank, a move that could legitimize blockchain as a vehicle for fiat cryptocurrencies.

JPM Coin, as the bank is calling its new cryptocoin, is considered fiat currency because it’s backed by U.S. dollars in accounts designated at JPMorgan Chase N.A. The lender moves more than $6 trillion around the world every day for corporations in its massive wholesale payments business.

One JPM Coin has the equivalent value of one U.S. dollar. Trials for the new cryptocoin are expected to begin in the next few months, according to a CNBC report.

In the crypto industry, an instrument like JPM Coin is known as a “stablecoin” because it has an intrinsic value, unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum’s ETH coins, whose value is based on supply and demand of virtual money.

“When one client sends money to another over the blockchain, JPM Coins are transferred and instantaneously redeemed for the equivalent amount of U.S. dollars, reducing the typical settlement time,” JPMorgan said in an online FAQ. “The JPM Coin is based on blockchain-based technology enabling the instantaneous transfer of payments between institutional accounts.”

J.P. Morgan is preparing for a future in which parts of the essential underpinning of global capitalism, from cross-border payments to corporate debt issuance, move to the blockchain. That’s the database technology made famous by its first application, bitcoin. But in order for that future to happen, the bank needed a way to transfer money at the dizzying speed that those smart contracts closed, rather than relying on old technology like wire transfers.

“So anything that currently exists in the world, as that moves onto the blockchain, this would be the payment leg for that transaction,” said Umar Farooq, head of J.P. Morgan’s blockchain projects. “The applications are frankly quite endless; anything where you have a distributed ledger which involves corporations or institutions can use this.”

There are three early applications for the JPM Coin, according to Farooq.

The first is for international payments for large corporate clients, which now typically happens using wire transfers between financial institutions on decades-old networks like Swift. Instead of sometimes taking more than a day to settle because institutions have cut-off times for transactions and countries operate on different systems, the payments will settle in real time, and at any time of day, he said.

The second is for securities transactions. In April, J.P. Morgan tested a debt issuance on the blockchain, creating a virtual simulation of a $150 million certificate of deposit for a Canadian bank. Rather than relying on wires to buy the issuance — resulting in a time gap between settling the transaction and being paid for it — institutional investors can use the J.P. Morgan token, resulting in instant settlements.

The final use would be for huge corporations that use J.P Morgan’s treasury services business to replace the dollars they hold in subsidiaries across the world. Unseen by retail customers, the business handles a significant chunk of the world’s regulated money flows for companies from Honeywell International to Facebook, moving dollars for activities like employee and supplier payments. It generated $9 billion in revenue last year for the bank.

J.P Morgan is betting that its first-mover status and large market share in corporate payments — it banks 80 percent of the companies in the Fortune 500 — will give its technology a good chance of getting adopted, even if other banks create their own coins.

“Pretty much every big corporation is our client, and most of the major banks in the world are, too,” Farooq said. “Even if this was limited to JPM clients at the institutional level, it shouldn’t hold us back.”