CEO Who Called Bitcoin A "Pet Rock" Just Begged His Shareholders For Blockchain.

Take a look at this timeline. It's wild:

2017. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan (largest bank in the US), threatens to fire anyone who buys Bitcoin.
2023. Calls it "a hyped-up fraud" and "a pet rock" on CNBC.
2024. Tells Davos he'd "close it down" if he could. Then quietly admits he's "a believer in stablecoins" 6 months later.
April 2026. Publishes his shareholder letter saying "a whole new set of competitors is emerging based on blockchain." Tells shareholders JPMorgan needs to "roll out our own blockchain technology."

That's one heck of a 9 year journey...from "fire anyone who touches it" to "WE NEED TO BUILD WITH IT."

So what happened?

Instead of formally endorsing Bitcoin, Dimon is admitting the technology underneath it (tokenization, stablecoins, smart contracts) is gutting how banks make money.

Here's what that looks like:

Buying a government bond today takes 2 days to settle. You pay middlemen at every step. A tokenized version? Minutes. Around the clock. Cheaper.
You deposit $1,000 at JPMorgan, the bank lends it out and keeps the interest. You get crumbs. A stablecoin holds that dollar 1:1. You hold it. The bank never touches it.
$315 billion already sits in stablecoins globally. That's $315 billion that walked out of the banking system.
Tokenized assets grew from $5 billion to $24 billion in 3 years. BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Goldman Sachs all jumped in.
Estimates put tokenized assets at $10 to $16 trillion by 2030.

JPMorgan's response is pretty aggressive given it's CEO's former skepticism. Build its own blockchain (Kinexys), its own stablecoin (JPM Coin), and reportedly a $100 million tokenized fund on Ethereum.

One thing worth sitting with though...

JPMorgan's blockchain is permissioned.

This means they decide who gets in and who gets kicked out.

Ethereum and Bitcoin work very differently. No single company can censor a transaction. Both are called "blockchain." They give you very different things.

So the most powerful banker alive has firmly answered the question of whether this technology works.

The question that matters now is this: Who controls the version you end up using?

That's why we started this community.

What do you know about how banks work?

Do you like yours?

Is it something we should be trying to change?

Give us your thoughts.

0 comments