JPMorgan's stablecoin finally sees commercial light of day

A year-and-a-half after it was first announced, JPM Coin - JPMorgan Chase's in-house stablecoin - is now live and in use by a major transnational tech firm for round-the-clock cross-border payments.

On the heels of PayPal's recent embrace of crypto, incumbents' confidence that blockchain can actually make them money appears to be on the rise.

JPMorgan's experimentation and development with the technology thus far can be broken up into several key areas.

First, the megabank has been piloting a blockchain-based Interbank Information Network since 2017, involving over 400 participant banks and corporations.

JPMorgan believes that the network, now being rebranded as Liink, can bring significant efficiency savings for the complex interactions of corresponding banks in cross-border wholesale payments.

JPMorgan itself accounts for cross-border wholesale payment flows of over $6 trillion per day, across over 100 different countries.

The bank has also identified blockchain's usefulness to innovate the existing, outdated system for processing "Hundreds and millions" of paper checks.

"Using a version of blockchain with the participants being the main issuers of checks and the main operators of lockboxes, it's possible we can save 75% of the total cost for the industry today, and make checks available in a matter of minutes as opposed to days."

Lastly, JPMorgan has confidence in blockchain for the creation of new payment rails for global central banks and their evolving central bank digital currencies.

"If you think about blockchain, we are either somewhere in the trough of disillusionment or just beyond that on the hype curve. That's why at JPMorgan we've been relatively quiet about it until we were ready to scale it and commercialize it."