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More than four years after it began testing its own blockchain-based stablecoin, JPMorgan Chase & Co. is processing $1 billion in transaction volume per day for JPM Coin, Takis Georgakopoulos, JPMorgan’s global head of payments, told Bloomberg News during an interview.
Created in 2019 and launched in 2020, JPM Coin is pegged to the U.S. dollar to facilitate instant payments between the bank and large companies. It’s based on Quorum, a protocol used in a private blockchain network. In 2023, JPMorgan added support for the Euro to JPM coin.
During the interview, Georgakopoulos said the next step in the JPM Coin’s evolution is to create a retail version of the token to address major problems in the payments sector, including speed of payments, especially cross-border payments, and transaction reconciliation.
“There are cut-off times, there are delays in making payments, especially cross-border payments. The second issue is money information moves separately, which makes it hard to reconcile, change, understand, and track. And then number three, money is fungible, whereas our activities are not,” Georgakopoulos said in the interview. “Fungible” refers to the quality of interchangeability.
“The reason we created the JPM coin, and in general we are looking at digital currencies, is a way to solve those three issues. The next step in that journey is how you can create a more retail version of that so that you can bring that same efficiency to consumers and, obviously central bank digital currencies are one way to do it.”
