JPMorgan has deployed JPM Coin, a token representing dollar deposits at the bank, on the Ethereum mainnet, making it available to institutional clients. The bank said in an emailed statement that the token was technically deployed on Monday 19 October 2026. JPMorgan, the largest US bank, brought the almost year-old token to Ethereum as part of a plan to expand beyond Base, the layer-2 blockchain built by Coinbase Global.
Emma Landriault, head of Kinexys Labs at JPMorgan's blockchain division Kinexys, said the bank chose Ethereum because the blockchain offers more liquidity than rival networks and is already used by institutional clients. "Issuing JPM Coin first on Base and now on Ethereum is a meaningful step towards providing our institutional clients with multi-chain optionality for moving wholesale money across both the web3 and traditional finance ecosystems," she said in the statement.
CRYPTO AND FINANCIAL FIRMS ARE THE TARGET
Broadening availability aims to serve crypto firms that want to make blockchain payments and financial firms that need a digital token to settle trades or back tokenised assets, Landriault said. Almost $50 billion worth of crypto assets are locked in Ethereum-based applications, according to DeFiLlama.
The deposit token allows clients to send and receive money in seconds and 24/7, rather than over several days and only during working hours. It first launched on Base on 12 November 2025. The ramp back to ordinary bank accounts closes for three hours each Saturday, from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. US Eastern time.
KINEXYS AND THE ROUTE TO ETHEREUM
The move expands JPMorgan's blockchain efforts beyond its private Kinexys network and Base. Kinexys already handles more than $7 billion a day, a small piece of the bank's $12 trillion a day payments business.
The bank said Kinexys has processed more than $4 trillion in transactions to date. Kinexys launched the USD deposit token proof-of-concept in June 2025, and B2C2, Coinbase and Mastercard completed test transactions using JPM Coin. The bank had flagged a move outside Base in January, saying it planned to take the token to the Canton Network.
SHARED NETWORKS AND THE SWIFT LEDGER
In the US, JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, along with more than a dozen other banks, plan to start a shared network for tokenised deposits. The banks are collaborating to launch it by mid-2027, and it will connect traditional payment rails with the infrastructure that digital assets run on.
The planned shared network for tokenized deposits, which JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and more than a dozen other US banks intend to start, is an attempt to stave off threats from crypto companies. Abroad, JPMorgan is among more than 30 banks helping Swift, the interbank messaging service, define the features and governance of its blockchain-based ledger. In July, Swift said 17 banks, including Citi and Wells Fargo, were preparing to pilot live transactions on it.
TREATMENT UNDER EU RULES
In the EU, the MiCA regulation does not apply to crypto-assets that qualify as deposits under Article 2(4)(b). A bank deposit token would therefore fall under banking rules rather than the e-money token regime.
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