U.S. banking giant JPMorgan has done a complete about-face and is now seemingly bullish on Bitcoin.
In a recent report, the Wall Street giant said Bitcoin’s 2020 performance had demonstrated the asset’s growth and maturation, while also noting the compelling correlation Bitcoin was exhibiting with global equities.
JPMorgan Bullish on Bitcoin?
After the bank’s CEO Jamie Dimon called it a “fraud,” and warned its employees that they’d be fired if caught buying any BTC to now acknowledging Bitcoin’s impressive performance in post-Covid markets, JPMorgan has had the sharpest of turnarounds.
The public reversal came after the bank had examined the performance of Bitcoin during the mid-March massive sell-off due to the Covid market crash.
The report asserted that despite all assets crashing hard, ‘Bitcoin emerged relatively unscathed,’ and that its performance since had shown that Bitcoin has ‘longevity as an asset class.’
The Bullish Bitcoin Signs Had Been Uncovering
It’s not the first signal that JPMorgan was starting to turn the corner on its public approach to Bitcoin.
The first sign of America’s biggest bank getting into crypto (not Bitcoin) was when it announced it was launching its own stablecoin, JPM Coin.
A spokesman then said the bank had been testing its own coin, and it had enabled the ‘instantaneous transfer of payments between institutional clients.’ A sure sign they had realised the benefits of blockchain first-hand.
Then last month, the bank announced it had started accepting clients from the digital asset industry, naming Bitcoin exchanges Coinbase and Gemini as its first two clients.
The bank announced it would not be getting involved in either exchange’s cryptocurrency transactions, however.
The bank’s main role would initially be to provide cash-management services, handling dollar-based transactions, processing wire transfers, deposits, and withdrawals for the exchange’s US customers.
JPMorgan revealed that proper regulation was critical to their decision, and both exchanges had taken the necessary steps to comply with regulations and were both registered money transmitters with FinCEN.
Conclusion
JPMorgan’s one-eighty has surprised nobody in the Bitcoin space.
When the banks CEO Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin a fraud back in 2017, it was during the hysteria of the Bitcoin bull run, and banks and China did everything they could to defile Bitcoin.
But JPMorgan and all banks are interested in Bitcoin.
Of course banks have to be reserved in what they say, but to dismiss something so revolutionary is suicide to any bank, and I believe in the coming months we will see many more banks opening up to Bitcoin.
And as they do the narrative will turnaround quicker than JPMorgan’s Bitcoin stance.
Author: Pablo Clarke
A Bitcoiner since 2017 and a Bitcoin Maximalist since 2018, Tommy is our main writer and editor at Bitcoin Maximalist. Other than researching and writing about Bitcoin, Tommy loves spending time with his family and supporting his beloved Leeds United.
