JPMorgan puts JPM Coin, its dollar deposit token, on Ethereum

JPM Coin goes live on Ethereum mainnet

JPMorgan, the largest bank in the United States, has deployed its JPM Coin token on Ethereum's mainnet, the bank said in an emailed statement. JPM Coin represents dollar deposits held at the bank.

The token is now available for institutional clients to use. The move extends the token beyond Base, the layer-2 blockchain built by Coinbase. A layer-2 network is a system built on top of a main blockchain to handle activity more cheaply and quickly.

The bank said the technical deployment happened on Monday, October 19, 2026. Bloomberg reported the news earlier the same day.

Why the bank picked Ethereum

Emma Landriault, head of Kinexys Labs at JPMorgan's blockchain division Kinexys, told Bloomberg in an interview that the bank chose Ethereum because it offers more liquidity than rival networks and is already used by institutional clients.

Liquidity generally refers to how easily an asset can be bought or sold without moving its price.

Key points from the announcement

• JPM Coin represents dollar deposits at JPMorgan and is about a year old.
• The token was first issued on Base and is now also on Ethereum.
• Landriault said in the emailed statement that issuing JPM Coin first on Base and now on Ethereum is "a meaningful step towards providing our institutional clients with multi-chain optionality for moving wholesale money across both the web3 and traditional finance ecosystems."
• JPMorgan said in January 2026 that it planned to move the token outside Base and take it to the Canton Network.

What JPMorgan says the token is for

According to Landriault, widening where JPM Coin is available aims to serve crypto firms that want to make blockchain payments and financial firms that need a digital token to settle trades or back tokenized assets.

Tokenization means turning real-world or financial assets into a digital form recorded and traded on a decentralized ledger. The stated benefit is speed, including faster settlement of trades and quicker movement of money without the delays and frictions of traditional payment rails.

Kinexys and the wider banking push

JPMorgan's private blockchain network, Kinexys, already processes more than $7 billion a day, the article says. That compares with the bank's roughly $12 trillion a day payments business overall, making Kinexys a small part of it.

Banks have adopted tokenization mostly away from public networks. In the U.S., JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, along with more than a dozen other banks, have plans to start a shared network for tokenized deposits.

Outside the U.S., JPMorgan is among more than 30 banks helping Swift with a related effort, according to the source material.

Nearly $50 billion worth of crypto assets are locked in Ethereum-based applications, according to DeFiLlama, a data provider cited in the article.

What is confirmed

JPMorgan said JPM Coin was technically deployed on Ethereum's mainnet on Monday, October 19, 2026, and is available for institutional clients' use. The bank confirmed the token represents dollar deposits at the bank and that it was previously issued on Base.

What is still unclear

The source material does not say how much JPM Coin has been issued, which specific institutional clients will use it on Ethereum, or when the previously announced plan to bring the token to the Canton Network might happen.

Why it matters

JPM Coin is a deposit token, meaning it stands for money customers have placed at the bank rather than a new asset. Putting it on Ethereum gives JPMorgan a public blockchain option alongside its private Kinexys network, which the source says is used for a small share of the bank's payments volume.

Sources

• CoinDesk