Jamie Dimon Attacks Crypto Tokens as ‘Decentralized Ponzi Scheme’ But He’s Happy With Regulated Stablecoins

Jamie Dimon, the chair­man and CEO of Wall Street invest­ment bank JPMor­gan, has tak­en anoth­er swing at cryp­tocur­ren­cies, with a par­tic­u­lar focus on bit­coin (BTC), telling the U.S. Con­gress that cryp­tos were “decen­tral­ized Ponzi schemes”. At the same time, Dimon said he accepts the added val­ue of blockchain, decen­tral­ized finance (DeFi), “tokens that do some­thing”, and reg­u­lat­ed stablecoins.

The lat­est devel­op­ment con­firms the banker’s rep­u­ta­tion among cryp­to indus­try observers, many of which see him as a lega­cy finance advo­cate will­ing to go to lengths to blast cryp­tocur­ren­cies. In his recent tes­ti­mo­ny before Con­gress, Dimon told a law­mak­er he is “a major skep­tic on cryp­to tokens, which you call cur­ren­cy, like bit­coin,” as report­ed by Bloomberg.

Last Octo­ber, Dimon crit­i­cized bit­coin, say­ing his per­son­al view on the top cryp­to was that it was “worth­less.” The exec­u­tive did, how­ev­er, add that JPMorgan’s clients were “adults,” and he was pre­pared to give them “as clean as pos­si­ble access” to the coin – although his firm couldn’t cur­rent­ly “cus­tody” BTC.

In line with the stance he recent­ly pre­sent­ed to Amer­i­can law­mak­ers, the banker wrote in his April 2022 let­ter to JPMorgan’s share­hold­ers that “[d]ecentralized finance and blockchain are real, new tech­nolo­gies that can be deployed in both pub­lic and pri­vate fash­ion, per­mis­sioned or not.”

In 2020, JPMor­gan ven­tured into the blockchain sec­tor by launch­ing its own token, JPM Coin, designed by the finan­cial giant to instant­ly set­tle pay­ments between insti­tu­tion­al clients.

Ear­li­er this year, the bank also unveiled its focus on the meta­verse, claim­ing that “when you think about the eco­nom­ics of the metaverse—or metanomics—there are oppor­tu­ni­ties in almost every mar­ket area” and it will also pro­vide “a mas­sive oppor­tu­ni­ty for busi­ness-to-busi­ness enterprises.”