Jonathan Gray
JPMorgan Chase, the biggest bank in the U.S., is now allowing its clients to buy bitcoin — a big change of heart for an institution whose CEO, Jamie Dimon, has been a long-time critic of the scarce digital asset.
Dimon made the announcement on the bank’s investor day, which came as a shift in JPMorgan’s approach to digital assets. “We are going to allow you to buy it,” he said. “We’re not going to custody it. We’re going to put it in statements for clients.”
That means clients can buy BTC through JPMorgan but the bank won’t hold or store the digital asset. Instead it will provide access and include the BTC purchases in client statements.
According to multiple reports and posts, JPMorgan has been blocking transactions from digital asset exchanges, with several people complaining about their experience on social media.
There is even an official notice on the company’s UK website that explicitly says customers cannot use their funds to purchase digital assets.
It’s a big change because Dimon has been one of Bitcoin’s biggest critics. Over the years he’s called it “worthless”, a “fraud” and even compared it to a “pet rock”.
He’s repeatedly expressed concern over digital assets’ use in illegal activities such as money laundering, terrorism, sex trafficking and tax evasion. A role that his critics say the U.S. dollar is playing on a much larger scale.
Related: Jamie Dimon Would “Close Down” Bitcoin If He Had Government Role
“The only true use case for it is criminals, drug traffickers … money laundering, tax avoidance,” he told lawmakers during a Senate hearing in 2023. At the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos, he doubled down, “Bitcoin does nothing. I call it the pet rock.”
Despite his personal views, Dimon says the bank is responding to client demand. “I don’t think you should smoke, but I defend your right to smoke,” he said. “I defend your right to buy bitcoin.”
It’s worth noting JPMorgan isn’t fully embracing digital assets. The bank won’t be offering direct custody services or launching its own exchange.
Instead, it’s offering access to digital asset exchanges. There are even reports that the bank also plans to facilitate access to bitcoin ETFs and possibly other investment vehicles. Until recently, JPMorgan had limited its bitcoin exposure to futures-based products.
Other big financial firms have already taken similar steps.
Morgan Stanley, for example, has been offering some clients access to bitcoin ETFs since August 2024. Its CEO, Ted Pick, said earlier this year that the firm is working closely with regulators to explore ways to get into the digital assets space.
Dimon does like blockchain, though — the technology that underpins it. JPMorgan has its own blockchain projects including JPM Coin and recently ran a test transaction on a public blockchain of tokenized U.S. Treasuries.
Many criticize this view, saying that the most powerful aspect of Bitcoin is its decentralization. So, a centralized blockchain is just useless. This might be the reason Dimon has grown weary of all JPMorgan’s blockchain initiatives, because they offered nothing of value.
He said he might have given blockchain too much credit during his investor day comments: “We have been talking about blockchain for 12 to 15 years,” he said. “We spend too much on it. It doesn’t matter as much as you all think.”
