J.P. Morgan's latest deal highlights bank's growing interest in crypto assets over blockchain infrastructure.
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Yesterday, there was a surprise announcement from Wall Street’s blockchain contingent: J.P. Morgan sold Quorum, the enterprise blockchain the bank spent years developing, to ConsenSys, the Brooklyn-based blockchain software firm run by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin.
It was an interesting move by the big bank, which has lately been heading more towards the world of cryptocurrency than away from it. Last year, J.P. Morgan announced its own blockchain-based payment system, JPM Coin, and is now also banking crypto exchanges Coinbase and Gemini.
So why would J.P. Morgan decide to jettison its blockchain tech now? My hunch is that it reflects a shift in priorities on Wall Street, where financial firms have lately put greater emphasis on trading businesses than software businesses—and building blockchains is, at its core, a software business.
The trend is a major reason why Catherine Coley, CEO of major crypto exchange Binance’s U.S. arm, this week declared 2020 to “be the year cryptocurrency goes mainstream,” noting reports that finance heavyweights from PayPal to Goldman Sachs are more seriously exploring digital assets and crypto.
The friendly attitude towards digital currency is a far cry from the “Bitcoin Bad, Blockchain Good” tune that bank leaders (including J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon) were singing just three years ago. It’s not exactly surprising: Cryptocurrency, along with tech stocks—risk assets, as you might call them—are basically the best story to come out of 2020: they’re the only things that keep going up (well, besides COVID-19 cases).
As Coley points out, Bitcoin outperformed other winners including Apple, Amazon and Microsoft stocks, as well as real estate, over the past decade: “When the best performing asset doesn’t even exist in traditional banking models, banks get interested,” she writes in Fortune.
Goldman, for its part, has also been quietly reorganizing its digital assets and cryptocurrency team. The bank teased a Bitcoin trading operation in mid-2018, during then-CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s final days at the helm, but those plans languished after current CEO David Solomon took over later that year (and cryptocurrency prices collapsed). Then this February, Goldman lost Rana Yared, who was helping to lead its blockchain and crypto efforts. But earlier this month, Goldman revealed it had hired a new global head of digital assets, Mathew McDermott, while also poaching a former leader of J.P. Morgan’s Quorum project, Oli Harris. “It definitely feels like there is a resurgence of interest in cryptocurrencies,” McDermott told CNBC.
Meanwhile, with a flurry of deal activity among financial firms, there may be more blockchain shakeouts. Charles Schwab, for one, is in the process of acquiring TD Ameritrade, which has its own “scalable blockchain” in the works, and was also early to offer Bitcoin futures trading—though Schwab has not expressed interest in getting into the crypto business.
For now, J.P. Morgan is keeping at least one foot in blockchain tech, taking a “strategic investment” in ConsenSys as part of the Quorum spinoff: “We look forward to continuing our multifaceted partnership with J.P. Morgan for many years and ushering in an era of enterprise and mainnet compatibility,” Lubin said in a statement. But so it may also end the era of banks trying to build their own blockchains—which, some would argue, were never truly blockchains at all.
Jen Wieczner
