In brief
- JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon has long slammed Bitcoin, once calling the digital coin “worthless.”
- But at the bank’s investor day, the billionaire said his institution would allow customers to buy Bitcoin, but not custody it.
JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon said on Monday that his bank will allow its customers to buy Bitcoin—the latest sign of the bank’s increased openness to the asset, despite Dimon’s years of criticizing the largest crypto by market value and digital assets more widely.
In remarks during the investment bank’s investor day, Dimon said that JP Morgan clients would soon be able to buy BTC, although the bank wouldn’t custody it.
“We are going to allow you to buy it,” Dimon said at the bank’s annual investor day on Monday. “We’re not going to custody it. We’re going to put it in statements for clients.”
The pronouncement represents a pivot for JP Morgan and wider embrace of the traditional finance world that once shunned Bitcoin.
Dimon has been particularly critical of Bitcoin, saying at one point that the biggest digital coin’s “true use case” was for criminals.
The billionaire banker has also called Bitcoin “a fraud,” and last year described it as a “pet rock,” before telling journalists he’d “shut it down” if he could.
“I’ve always been opposed to crypto, Bitcoin, etcetera,” he said in 2023.
But now—likely due to client demands—the bank will allow customers to buy it, Dimon said.
Decrypt reached out to the bank for comment.
Other top U.S. banks are also offering crypto-related products. Morgan Stanley boss Ted Pick said in January the bank would work with regulators to see how they could offer crypto safely and said in January that it would allow financial advisors to pitch some spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds to qualified customers.
Despite criticizing Bitcoin itself, Dimon, who’s been CEO of the world’s largest investment bank since 2006, has praised blockchain technology, and the bank has used the technology for its own projects.
U.S. regulators are now taking a more relaxed approach to the space since crypto-friendly Donald Trump became president last year.
Under the new commander in chief, the Securities and Exchange Commission in January rescinded the Staff Accounting Bulletin (SAB) No. 121, a bill that prevented banks from custodying digital assets.
Edited by James Rubin
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