Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, is being reprimanded by the crypto community on X for speaking ill of crypto at the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. Collin Brown, a blockchain researcher and a supporter of cryptocurrencies, tweeted on X about Jason Dimon’s statement that crypto is for criminals.
Dimon said that the only true case of crypto is to help criminals and drug traffickers in money laundering and tax avoidance. Furthermore, he said that if he were the government, he would close crypto down.
In response to this, crypto experts pointed out that JPMorgan is the second-largest penalized bank. They highlighted the 272 violations since 2000 and the $39.3 billion fine paid to settle those.
Gabor Gurbacs, strategy adviser at VanEck, after noting that the banks paid over $380 billion in fines this century, said that Jamie Dimon is in no position to criticize Bitcoin with this sort of track record.
In September 2023, JPMorgan agreed to a settlement of $75 million with the U.S. Virgin Islands over complaints that they enabled and financially benefitted from Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation between 2002 and 2005.
In October 2013, the bank paid the largest fine in its history, $13 billion, for misleading investors over toxic mortgage deals. The bank also paid nearly $1 billion to settle an investigation pertaining to the manipulation of various metals futures markets between 2008 and 2016 by several JPMorgan traders in September 2020.
The bank was also at the forefront of the largest cocaine bust in U.S. history when $1.3 billion worth of cocaine was seized on a ship that was run by a fund managed by JPMorgan. Walker, a podcast host, said that Jamie Dimon seems confused and that he’s actually describing JP Morgan and their clients.
In the concluding statement to the U.S. Senator Elizabeth Wallet, JP Morgan CEO said that if he were the government, he would close Bitcoin and cryptocurrency down. In spite of opposing the digital asset sector, they launched their own crypto token – JPM Coin, in a private version of the Ethereum blockchain for its client base.
In October, JPMorgan launched a blockchain-based tokenization platform with BlackRock as one of its clients. In April 2021, the bank contributed a $65 million funding round for Ethereum infrastructure firm Consensys.
Bankless condemned Dimon’s comments, explaining that the U.S. government cannot impose a ban on Bitcoin or the crypto sector due to its decentralized nature. His comments triggered a community notes fact check on X, expressing that less than 1% of cryptocurrency transactions are illegal.
