JPMorgan's deposit token, now on the main chain

JPMorgan has made its dollar deposit token, JPM Coin, available on Ethereum, Kinexys by J.P. Morgan said in an announcement on Monday. The token, which carries the ticker JPMD, is open to the bank's institutional clients. Until now it had been available only on Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network, since its launch in November 2025. JPMorgan calls Ethereum the token's second public blockchain.

A deposit token is a claim on deposits at a bank, rather than a token issued by a non-bank against a pool of reserves, as stablecoins are. JPMorgan says JPM Coin supports peer-to-peer transfers between institutional clients within the Ethereum Virtual Machine ecosystem, including Base and Ethereum, and could allow programmable treasury operations from clients' own wallet interfaces. The announcement does not mention access for retail customers.

The bank presented the move as part of a wider presence on Ethereum. J.P. Morgan Asset Management launched tokenised money market funds on the network earlier this year, the announcement says. Ledger Insights called the move "positioning": Base "made sense as a launch partner given the Coinbase relationship", it wrote, but tokenised funds and securities are concentrated on Ethereum, and a token meant to serve as the cash leg of those trades needs to be on the same chain.

"Tokenized financial infrastructure is no longer theoretical," said Emma Landriault, global head of Kinexys Labs. "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." Matthew Dawson, co-founder of Ethereum Institutional, called it "a clear signal that institutional finance is moving onto public, verifiable infrastructure". His organisation promotes Ethereum to institutions.

JPMorgan said the Kinexys platform has processed more than $4tn in cumulative transactions since it began, with average daily volume of $7bn, figures it says were calculated from Kinexys's internal data. Ledger Insights noted that those numbers cover all of Kinexys's services, including payments and its tokenised collateral network, and "say nothing about JPMD activity on public chains". The announcement gives no figures for JPM Coin itself.

Ethereum is not the last stop. In January, Kinexys and Digital Asset said JPM Coin would be issued natively on the Canton Network, a blockchain used by financial institutions, with a rollout "in phases throughout 2026". Monday's announcement does not mention Canton, and we found no announcement that the token is live there.

Banks and card networks are competing with stablecoin issuers to carry settlement on public chains. Komposite has reported on Mastercard's first BVNK product, which holds fiat and stablecoins together, on the EU's classification of USDC as a significant e-money token and on Deutsche Bank's plans for crypto custody.