When a US senator brought up the executive’s past criticism of cryptocurrency, Jamie Dimon didn’t hold back.
“I’m a major skeptic on crypto tokens, which you call currency, like Bitcoin,” the JPMorgan Chase & Co. chief executive officer said in congressional testimony Wednesday. “They are decentralized Ponzi schemes.”
Stablecoins — digital assets tied to the value of the US dollar or other currencies — wouldn’t be problematic with the proper regulation, and JPMorgan is active in blockchain, Dimon said.
The comments represent the latest criticism leveled against digital currencies by Dimon, who once called Bitcoin “a fraud” before eventually saying he regretted the comments.
House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters and Ranking Member Patrick McHenry have been working to reach an agreement on stablecoin legislation. Under the latest version of the bill, it would be illegal to issue or create new “endogenously collateralized stablecoins” such as those similar to TerraUSD, the algorithmic stablecoin that collapsed earlier this year.
While Dimon has been a vocal critic of Bitcoin, the firm has been focused on using blockchain for financial services. JPMorgan uses its custom blockchain and token, JPM Coin, to conduct intraday repurchase agreements, which allows other financial institutions to take out short-term loans using high-quality collateral. JPMorgan was also the first Wall Street bank to launch a presence in the metaverse in February.
In 2017, Dimon called Bitcoin a scam, remarks he subsequently admitted he regretted. He claimed it was useless in October but promised to follow clients’ requests. More recently, he has said that decentralised finance, in which banks are replaced by algorithms, is “real.
