JPMorgan Weighs Crypto Trading to Expand Digital Asset Presence

JPMorganChase is reportedly weighing cryptocurrency trading for its institutional clients.

The country’s largest bank is determining what products and services its markets division could offer to widen its digital assets business, Bloomberg News reported Monday (Dec. 22), citing a source familiar with the plans.

The efforts, which the source said could involve spot and derivatives trading, come in response to increasing interest in digital assets amid a relaxed regulatory environment.

Bloomberg notes that while JPMorgan has been very active in blockchain, a crypto trading move would mark the latest indication of how the banking sector has warmed to digital assets as the Trump  administration has passed the country’s first stablecoin legislation and appointed pro-crypto regulators.

One of those regulatory bodies, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) said earlier this month that banks can engage in permissible activities related to riskless principal transactions in crypto assets.

Days later, the OCC issued new national bank trust charters to five applicants from the digital asset and blockchain finance space.

“A national bank charter can convey significant advantages including the preemption of state banking laws in certain areas, access to the Federal Reserve payments system, and the license of federal supervision,” PYMNTS wrote at the time. “All of which can lower friction for scaling operations nationwide.”

In related news, JPMorgan last week successfully arranged a U.S. commercial paper issuance on the Solana blockchain, making what it says was one of the earliest debt issuances ever executed on a public blockchain, the banking giant said in a Thursday (Dec. 11) news release.

It’s also one of the first debt issuances in the U.S. to use the blockchain to issue and service securities, “a significant milestone for financial markets globally,” the company said.

This is all happening at a time when, as PYMNTS noted in a recent report, blockchain technology is beginning to shift from its role as a crypto-specific concept into a potential piece of core banking infrastructure.

“Once the domain of startups, it is now part of how global institutions such as Citi, J.P. Morgan, Visa and others are exploring the future of payments and liquidity management,” that report said. “From tokenized deposits and programmable payments to the settlement of digital assets, the technology previously seen as a niche outlier is increasingly being considered as part of the operating system for modern finance.”