JPMorgan expands blockchain goals, plans to build ‘interoperable digital money’

Banking giant JPMorgan wants to build its own “regulated, interoperable digital money” that can move near-instantly and securely across financial markets, a spokesperson for the bank told CoinDesk.

JPMorgan is already laying out plans to expand its JPM Coin deposit token beyond Base, the Ethereum Layer 2 network built by Coinbase, to Digital Asset’s privacy-focused Canton Network, and eventually to additional blockchain platforms—as it pushes toward a more interconnected, multichain settlement system for institutional payments.

“As part of the firm’s broader plan to issue JPM Coin on multiple blockchain networks, in bringing JPM Coin natively to Canton, this lays the foundation for regulated, interoperable digital money,” the spokesperson said. “With native availability of JPM Coin, institutions using Canton will be able to receive, transfer and redeem JPMD near-instantly within a secure and synchronized ecosystem.”

The JPM Coin is a deposit token. It represents U.S. dollar deposits held at J.P. Morgan and lets institutional clients make payments using a digital token on distributed ledgers.

The bank declined to detail specific legal or regulatory hurdles around issuing JPM Coin natively on public blockchain infrastructure but noted that “any expansions are subject to internal review, risk management and regulatory approval, if applicable.”

JPM Coin is currently available to JPMorgan’s institutional clients on Base. The bank said it enables secure, near-instant value transfers on public blockchain infrastructure, but only to whitelisted wallet addresses controlled by institutional clients, ensuring compliance and control.

Unlike its existing private systems, JPM Coin is not built on JPMorgan’s Kinexys network. “JPM Coin has never been offered on private, permissioned infrastructure,” the spokesperson said. Instead, JPMorgan’s separate Kinexys Digital Payments network, which launched in 2019, offers Blockchain Deposit Accounts for institutional clients to conduct 24/7 cross-border foreign exchange (FX) payments in USD, EUR and GBP.

“For example, Siemens leverages its Blockchain Deposit Accounts in Frankfurt and New York to make near-instant USD-to-EUR FX cross-border payments on Kinexys Digital Payments,” the bank said. “This enables Siemens’ global business to overcome limited settlement windows, further enhancing the efficiency and reliability of multi-currency, cross-border payments and liquidity management within its treasury platform.”

By contrast, JPM Coin as a deposit token operates entirely on public blockchain rails. When clients send or receive the token, a digital representation of the bank deposit is recorded directly on-chain.

Looking ahead, the JPMorgan spokesperson said it intends to support additional currencies and extend JPM Coin issuance to both public blockchain networks and its private Kinexys Digital Assets infrastructure. This would bring together the firm’s cash solutions across both private and public systems.

“As we did with Blockchain Deposit Accounts on Kinexys, we will expand the currencies on offer to institutional clients with JPM Coin over time,” the spokesperson told CoinDesk. “In offering more currencies and bringing JPM Coin on to other blockchains, we can further increase efficiency and unlock liquidity.”