29th December 2025 – (New York) JPMorgan Chase & Co. chief executive Jamie Dimon spent much of 2025 reaffirming his hostility towards Bitcoin, even as the bank he leads rolled out one of Wall Street’s most ambitious blockchain and digital‑asset build‑outs to date.
Dimon, a long‑standing critic of the world’s largest cryptocurrency, used a January appearance on CBS’s “60 Minutes” to reiterate that Bitcoin has “no intrinsic value”, explicitly associating it with activities such as sex trafficking, money laundering and ransomware. By July, he was likening Bitcoin ownership to smoking, stressing that while JPMorgan clients are free to buy digital assets, the bank itself would not act as a custodian.
Those sharp public interventions reinforced his reputation as one of the financial sector’s most outspoken Bitcoin sceptics. Yet behind the scenes, JPMorgan was deepening its commitment to blockchain‑based infrastructure and crypto‑related products.
In mid‑December, JPMorgan Asset Management launched the My OnChain Net Yield Fund (MONY), the bank’s first tokenised money‑market fund built on the Ethereum blockchain. The fund was seeded with US$100 million of the bank’s own capital before being opened to qualified investors on 16 December. At the same time, reports emerged that JPMorgan was exploring the provision of cryptocurrency trading services – including spot and derivatives – to institutional clients, a striking contrast to Dimon’s 2017 warning that he would fire any employee caught trading Bitcoin.
The expansion gathered pace throughout 2025. In October, the bank announced plans to allow institutional customers to use Bitcoin and Ethereum as collateral for secured lending. By November, it had formally introduced JPM Coin for institutions, enabling near‑instant value transfers on Coinbase’s Base blockchain, further embedding tokenised solutions in its wholesale payments offering.
Competitive pressures have been a key driver of that push. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund has become the frontrunner in the tokenised money‑market segment, with around US$1.8 billion in assets. More broadly, the tokenised US Treasury market swelled to roughly US$7.3 billion in 2025, a year‑on‑year increase of about 256 per cent, underscoring accelerating institutional interest in on‑chain versions of traditional securities.
Amid these developments, Dimon’s rhetoric began to draw a sharper distinction between Bitcoin itself and the underlying technologies powering the wider digital‑asset ecosystem. Speaking at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in October, he conceded that blockchain technology is “real” and likely to see broad adoption. Later that month, at Saudi Arabia’s Future Investment Initiative, he went further, acknowledging that crypto‑related tools such as blockchains, stablecoins and smart contracts are genuine financial innovations.
