Wall Street’s JPMorgan expanded its flagship crypto offering, the JPM Coin, to include Euro-denominated payments earlier today. The traditional finance giant began euro transactions through JPM Coin in an effort to combine blockchain technology’s utility with the world of traditional banking services.
According to a report by Bloomberg, Germany’s Siemens AG was the first company to conduct a euro transaction on JPMorgan’s permissioned blockchain payment system using the JPM Coin. A representative from the German conglomerate confirmed the cross-border euro payment. Basak Toprak, JPMorgan’s head of Coin Systems for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, told Bloomberg that the system began supporting Euro earlier today.
JPM Coin was launched by the banking giant back in 2019 as a way to facilitate the transfer of US Dollars. At the time, JPMorgan was one of the first banks to come up with a blockchain application for commercial use in the traditional finance sector. TradFi institutions reportedly spent nearly a decade developing such use cases for blockchain technology.
Despite being a first-of-its-kind offering, JPM Coin accounted for a very small part of JPMorgan’s payment business. JPM Coin facilitated transfers worth $300 billion since its launch in 2019. When compared to JPMorgan’s daily payment processing of a whopping $10 trillion, the business from JPM Coin is dwarfed further.
Toprak added that the bank’s blockchain payment system was also used by corporate treasurers to manage liquidity in an efficient manner. Speaking on JPM Coin’s advantages, Toprak stated:
There are cost benefits to paying at the right time. This could mean they could earn more interest income on their deposits.
Bloomberg reported that JPMorgan’s wholesale payments clients primarily used its blockchain-based payment system to transfer euros and dollars from several bank accounts around the world. Clients also used the system to pay other bank account holders instead of using traditional payment rails. Unlike traditional payment systems, JPM Coin allowed clients to make transfers 24*7.
