America’s biggest bank has spent the past year telling Washington that stablecoins could pull trillions of dollars out of the banking system. On Monday, JPMorgan made its JPMD digital dollar
America’s biggest bank has spent the past year telling Washington that stablecoins could pull trillions of dollars out of the banking system. On Monday, JPMorgan made its JPMD digital dollar available on Ethereum.
JPMorgan Chase said JPM Coin, its digital dollar for big business, is now live on Ethereum, the network behind the second-largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin. The token, built by the bank’s Kinexys unit, had been limited to Base, the smaller network run by Coinbase, since its November 2025 debut.
JPMorgan first used JPM Coin in February 2019, when it announced a digital dollar for payments between big clients on its own private network. It was the first digital coin from a major U.S. bank. The token in this story is a newer product with the same name. It has run on Base since November 2025, so Monday is not its launch. What is new is the network. Base is a smaller network that records its transactions on Ethereum, and this is the first time the token has run directly on Ethereum.
The announcement reads like Wall Street embracing crypto. The details say something else.
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JPMorgan is precise about what JPM Coin is not. Not a cryptocurrency, and not a stablecoin either, the bank says. It calls the token, ticker JPMD, a deposit token.
Each token represents one dollar sitting in a JPMorgan account. Holding it carries the same risk as an ordinary deposit at the bank, because that is what it is.
A stablecoin like USDC is issued by a private company against reserves of cash and Treasury bills. JPM Coin keeps the money, and the client, inside the bank.
Approved institutions use it in three steps.
Companies paying suppliers across time zones often set money aside in advance so it is ready when slow transfers finally clear. JPMorgan says near-instant settlement frees that capital for other uses.
The pitch is speed. A regular bank transfer can take days and stops for weekends and holidays. JPM Coin moves in seconds, 24 hours a day, all year.
The bank’s own documentation discloses the exception. Moving money between a client’s regular JPMorgan account and its blockchain account pauses every Saturday from 3 to 6 p.m. ET. The token keeps moving while customers cannot move dollars in or out. JPMorgan says an enhancement is under development.
There is a second catch. Ethereum is public, and anyone can see the transactions. Only institutions the bank has vetted can hold or send the token.
The bank also warns that tokens with similar names at other addresses have nothing to do with JPMorgan.
The JPMorgan Chase & Co. headquarters in New York, U.S., on Monday, Oct. 12, 2026.
Bloomberg via Getty Images
JPM Coin exists because banks are worried about losing deposits.
Under the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin law President Trump signed in 2025, issuers cannot pay interest on stablecoins. The law does not stop exchanges from offering rewards, and Coinbase advertises 3.75% on USDC for its Coinbase One members.
Banking lobby groups have spent months pressing Congress to close that gap, citing a Treasury estimate that up to $6.6 trillion in deposits could move to stablecoins. Their argument is blunt. Every dollar held in a yield-paying stablecoin is a dollar banks cannot lend.
Jamie Dimon framed the threat himself in his April letter to shareholders. “A whole new set of competitors is emerging based on blockchain, which includes stablecoins,” the JPMorgan CEO wrote. “We need to roll out our own blockchain technology.”
JPM Coin is the result.
Dimon’s history makes the move more striking. Dimon called Bitcoin “worthless” in 2021. In a 2023 Senate hearing, he said that if he were the government, he’d “close it down.” In 2024, he called it a “pet rock.”
By May 2025, the tone had changed even if the opinion had not. “We are going to allow you to buy it,” he told investors, adding the bank would not hold the coins for clients. “I defend your right to buy Bitcoin,” he said, while still criticizing its links to crime.
Now his bank issues its own dollar on the same kind of public network he spent years dismissing.
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan ChaseMICHEL EULER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
JPMorgan isn’t alone in rethinking its approach.
According to The Wall Street Journal, major U.S. banks are building a shared network for tokenized deposits, the industry’s name for bank money in token form.
The Journal also reported that banks have lobbied against letting stablecoins pay rewards to holders, arguing it could pull deposits out of banks.
Kinexys says it has processed more than $4 trillion since it began operating, an average of about $7 billion a day, based on its internal data.
JPMorgan moves roughly $12 trillion in payments daily, Bloomberg reported. Years in, the blockchain unit handles a fraction of a percent of that volume.
The bank has not said how much of that $7 billion is JPM Coin moving on public chains. The figure covers everything Kinexys does, most of it inside private systems.
Emma Landriault, global head of Kinexys Labs, said Ethereum’s “established depth of onchain liquidity and tokenized assets” made it the natural next network after Base.
Ethereum may not be the last network. Kinexys and Digital Asset, the company behind the Canton Network, have announced plans to bring JPMD to Canton, a blockchain built for regulated institutions.
Other big banks are making the same move. JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America and Wells Fargo are among more than a dozen banks planning a shared network for tokenized deposits, The Wall Street Journal reported.
JPMorgan is already offering related products on Ethereum. Its asset-management arm launched two money market funds there whose shares exist as blockchain tokens, in December 2025 and May 2026.
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