JPMorgan Chase has brought its JPM Coin deposit token to Ethereum, giving the bank's largest institutional clients a way to move dollars across a public blockchain in seconds—on a Sunday night just as easily as on a Tuesday morning. Unlike the private ledgers banks have long operated internally, public blockchains such as Ethereum are open networks whose transaction records anyone can inspect.

Each unit of JPM Coin represents a dollar already sitting in a JPMorgan account. The token is a deposit token rather than a stablecoin: while a stablecoin is pegged to the dollar by a private company that holds its reserves elsewhere, each JPM Coin stands for a deposit at the bank itself. According to the bank's website, clients can redeem the token for dollars at any time, with no lock-up. Only vetted, approved counterparties are permitted to hold it, meaning it cannot simply be purchased on an exchange.

The move extends a blockchain push JPMorgan says is designed to eliminate the frictions of traditional banking rails. A standard interbank wire only moves during business hours and can take days to land; JPM Coin is intended to cut that wait to seconds.

JPMorgan first deployed the token on Base—a cheaper, faster network built on top of Ethereum and incubated by Coinbase—in November 2025, following months of testing with Mastercard and Coinbase. Holders can now move the token between the two networks. Ethereum, unlike Base, is the base network itself—the foundation on which Base was built—so the token now operates at that foundational layer rather than on a network running atop it. In January, the bank also said it would bring JPM Coin to Canton Network, a privacy-focused blockchain built for financial markets. Separately, JPMorgan has issued two tokenized money-market funds on Ethereum, in December 2025 and May 2026—funds holding short-term debt that are represented as blockchain tokens.

The bank expects crypto firms to use the token for payments, while financial institutions can use it to pay for trades in tokenized assets or to post collateral—a guarantee pledged against a deal. 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 roughly $50 billion sits in applications, according to DefiLlama.

"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 launch also positions JPMorgan in direct competition with stablecoin issuers for the same customers. Last month, a consortium of more than 100 companies—including Visa, Stripe, and Mastercard—launched its own dollar stablecoin, a sign of how far dollar stablecoins have pushed into the mainstream of the payments industry. Naveen Mallela, co-head of Kinexys has argued that deposit tokens are "a compelling alternative" to stablecoins because they "can be yield-bearing," meaning they can pay interest.

Kinexys, the unit behind JPM Coin, has processed more than $4 trillion in cumulative transactions and averages about $7 billion per day, compared with roughly $12 trillion per day across JPMorgan's wider payments business.

Looking ahead, JPMorgan, Citigroup, and other large banks plan to launch a shared, 24/7 tokenized deposit network as early as the first half of 2027—a step that would take deposit tokens from one bank's proprietary tool to infrastructure shared across multiple institutions.

Source: Decrypt