JP Morgan Head of Digital Assets: “Most of crypto is still junk”

Category: Americas Blockchain Crypto
Posted by
Ravindu Dabarera

The banking giant JP Morgan has, in recent years, warmed up significantly to Blockchain technology with this May seeing the firm trailing tokenized collateral settlements through its own private Blockchain. This being said, its chief officer in the field Umar Farooq has argued that most of the Crypto market is still held aloft by speculation.

JP Morgan and the crypto market

Umar Farooq serves as the head of JP Morgan’s Head of Digital Assets through the firm’s Blockchain unit Onyx Digital Assets (ODA). His comments were made during a panel discussion at the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Green Shoots Seminar this week during which he pointed out how regulatory bottlenecks were holding back traditional financial giants such as institutional investors from involving themselves more actively in the space.

“So in my mind, the use cases haven’t arisen fully, and the regulation hasn’t caught up and I think that’s why you see the financial industry, in general, being a little bit slow in catching up

Elaborating on this, he noted that while Blockchain’s potential was worth exploring, the current market was still mainly lacking in terms of use-cases and real life application.

“Most of crypto is still junk actually, I mean with the exception of I would say, a few dozen tokens, everything else that has been mentioned is either noise or frankly, is just gonna go away.”

He also noted that the sector itself hasn’t matured to the point where it can be a pillar of transaction for high-value fiscal exchanges common amongst institutional investors.

“You need all of those things to mature so that you can actually do things with them. Right now, we’re just not there yet, most of the money that’s being used in Web3 today, in the current infrastructure, is for speculative investment.”

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