JPMorgan's JPM Coin Arrives on Ethereum, Putting Bank Dollars on a Public Blockchain

JPMorgan Chase is putting JPM Coin on Ethereum, which gives its biggest clients a way to move dollars in seconds on a Sunday night as easily as on a Tuesday morning.

A normal wire between banks only moves during business hours and can take days to land, which is why JPMorgan started experimenting with blockchain technology. The idea is using JPM Coin to cut that wait to seconds.

The token is a deposit token, so each unit stands for a dollar already sitting in a JPMorgan account, and the bank's site says clients can redeem it for dollars at any time with no lock-up. A stablecoin, by contrast, is a token pegged to the dollar by a private company that holds the reserves somewhere else.

Only vetted, approved counterparties can hold JPM Coin, so this is not a coin anyone can buy on an exchange.

JPMorgan first put the token on Base, a cheaper and faster network built on top of Ethereum and incubated by Coinbase, in November 2025. That followed months of testing with Mastercard and Coinbase, and holders can now move the token between the two networks.

In January, the bank also said it would bring JPM Coin to Canton Network, a privacy-focused blockchain built for financial markets. It has also issued two tokenized money-market funds on Ethereum, in December 2025 and May 2026, which are funds holding short-term debt that are represented as tokens.

Emma Landriault, global head of Kinexys Labs at JPMorgan's blockchain unit, pointed to the money and tokenized assets (traditional investments such as shares, debt and funds, issued as blockchain tokens) already circulating on Ethereum, where about $50 billion sits in applications, according to DefiLlama.

Crypto firms are expected to use the token for payments, while financial institutions can use it to pay for trades in tokenized assets or to post collateral, meaning a guarantee against a deal.

“We’ve clearly been in a year of further convergence between Wall Street and crypto,” Landriault told Bloomberg. Matthew Dawson, co-founder of Ethereum Institutional, called the move “a clear signal that institutional finance is moving onto public, verifiable infrastructure.”

The bank is also fighting for the same customers as stablecoin issuers. A consortium of more than 100 companies including Visa, Stripe, and Mastercard launched its own dollar stablecoin last month, while Kinexys co-head Naveen Mallela has said deposit tokens are “a compelling alternative” to stablecoins because they “can be yield-bearing,” meaning they can pay interest.

Kinexys, the unit behind the token, has handled more than $4 trillion in cumulative transactions and averages about $7 billion a day, against roughly $12 trillion a day across JPMorgan's wider payments business.

JPMorgan, Citigroup and other large banks plan to launch a shared 24/7 tokenized deposit network as early as the first half of 2027.