Jamie Dimon warns of growing crypto competition in annual letter: ‘We need to roll out our own blockchain technology’

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has long been among the crypto sector’s most notable skeptics. Dimon vowed in 2017 to fire any JPMorgan trader who traded bitcoin and has called the oldest cryptocurrency a “fraud” and a “pet rock.” More recently, though, Dimon has become more open to the technology and, this week, he acknowledged that blockchain-based companies are now among his bank’s competitors. 

In his annual shareholder letter published on Monday, Dimon said “a whole new set of competitors is emerging based on blockchain, which includes stablecoins, smart contracts and other forms of tokenization.” 

Dimon added that JPMorgan will need to up its game to ward off competition from the upstarts, writing: “We need to roll out our own blockchain technology.”

JPMorgan has been quietly rolling out its own blockchain technology for several years now. The bank unveiled its JPM Coin running on a permissioned blockchain in 2019. More recently, its Kinexys blockchain unit has continued to expand into areas like tokenization and payments. JPMorgan has explored permissionless blockchains, too: The co-CEOs of Commercial and Investment Banking at the firm recently tou...