‘A Massive Step’ – JPMorgan Just Made a Surprise, Game-Changing Bet on Crypto Despite $2 Trillion Bitcoin, Ethereum and Crypto Price Crash

BitcoinBTC
ethereum and other cryptocurrencies have struggled this year to turn people’s soaring expectations into reality – with Coinbase’s CEO even admitting to a serious miscalculation.

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The Bitcoin price has collapsed over the past year, plunging from an all-time high of nearly $70,000 per bitcoin to around $20,000. The Bitcoin price crash has dragged down the broader crypto market, wiping out about $2 trillion in nominal value.

Now JPMorgan, one of Wall Street’s biggest banks led by outspoken bitcoin and crypto skeptic Jamie Dimon, has completed its first ever cross-border transaction using blockchain-based decentralized finance (DeFi) in what has been called “a massive step” for the crypto space.

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This week, JPMorgan completed its first direct cross-border transaction on a public blockchain using the ethereum layer-two network PolygonMATIC
designed to help ethereum scale, and a modified version of the aave protocol – a DeFi technology that allows people to lend and borrow without the need for a trusted third party.

JPMorgan’s foreign exchange trading of tokenized cash deposits, using the bank’s wholesale payments blockchain division Onyx, was facilitated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) as part of a pilot program to “explore potential DeFi applications in wholesale funding markets.”

Developers of the DeFi lending protocol aave posted to Twitter that the pilot is a “huge milestone” for the technology, and represents “a massive step towards bridging traditional financial assets to DeFi.”

Singapore’s DBSDBS
Bank, Japan’s SBI Digital, Singapore Exchange’s digital asset platform Marketnode and Singapore state investor Temasek joined JPMorgan in the DeFi test.

“Crypto enthusiasts have never doubted that innovation coming out of this space – especially innovation in DeFi – has the potential to make international banking cheaper, faster and more efficient,” said Mikkel Morch, chairman of digital asset hedge fund ARK36, in an e-mail. comments. “Now the giants of traditional finance are beginning to confirm that by using DeFi protocols as a viable solution to streamline international money trading.”

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JPMorgan’s interest in crypto, blockchain and DeFi is somewhat at odds with the bank’s CEO Jamie Dimon, who called crypto a “decentralized Ponzi scheme” in September.

“It’s a little surprising to see JP Morgan at the forefront of this trend given how critical the bank’s CEO has been of the cryptocurrency space. But as the old saying goes, actions speak louder than words,” Marcus Sotiriou, analyst at digital asset. broker GlobalBlock said in an emailed statement.

In the past, cryptocurrencies have sometimes been unfairly called a solution in search of a problem. But make no mistake – seeing a bank like JPMorgan come and use open source solutions developed by cryptocurrency companies is not only a validation of DeFi as a technology, but also a validation of crypto as an industry.