HUGE! JPMORGAN BANK MOVES JPM COIN ON ETHEREUM! BLACKROCK'S NEW BITCOIN ETF! XRP LEDGER LENDING!

Tony Edward (0:05)

Hey, folks, welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast, your home for cryptocurrency news and interviews. I'm your host Tony Edward. On your way in, please hit that subscribe button, as well as the thumbs up button, and leave a comment below. If you're listening on a podcast platform such as Spotify or Apple, please be sure to follow and leave a five-star rating. All right, folks, first up, we have some big news around Blackrock. Blackrock has filed for the iShares Bitcoin Managed Protection ETF today, which it says will give downside protection to its previously launched Bitcoin ETF. Here's a quote, the fund seeks to provide upside exposure to the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF, called iBit, and or similar Bitcoin exposure up to an approximate limit. While seeking to provide a level of downside protection, the firm said in a filing to the SEC.

So Blackrock continues to innovate and get creative here.

They are looking to minimize the downside with this new ETF, so offering different avenues for folks to invest in the asset class. Now for crypto, they only have the Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, and I'm very curious if they're going to eventually file for an XRP, Solana and other altcoin ETFs. So we'll have to wait and see. I think over time they will, because as we see these other blockchains mature, there will be basket ETFs, kind of like the S&P 500 is an index. There will be an index for crypto, which may include the top 10, 20, maybe top 50 Over time that will evolve and grow, but it may be a little bit too early for Blackrock to try to take a position, but you never know, right? As the market gets competitive, there's more demand for other assets. You could see Blackrock start to develop more altcoin ETFs, but they are obviously all in on Bitcoin and Ethereum, and this is a very unique product they've built here for Bitcoin. I'm sure they're going to do the same thing for Ethereum. Now moving ahead, and I believe this is the big news of the day. Jpmorgan Bank brings Jpm Coin representing dollar deposits to Ethereum. Folks, we have one. If you recall, Jamie Dimon and Jpmorgan built a private version of Ethereum back in 2018-2019. They called it Quorum.

They've been trying to push their Jpm Coin on a private chain, trying to get other folks to come participate. But as we've been talking about for years, they're just simply creating a walled garden. They're taking the legacy issues of trust and moving it to the blockchain. And of course, they're creating the same environment where there's no decentralization. It's centralized. JPMorgan would control that blockchain, and not everybody's going to trust it.

So now, they are forced to bridge to public blockchains. And this is not the first blockchain, but this is a major capitulation because Ethereum, obviously, is the largest smart contract platform or blockchain out there. It's the second largest crypto behind Bitcoin by market cap. So huge capitulation. JPMorgan has already bridged to Ondo and Coinbase, which is Coinbase's Ethereum layer too. But to bridge to the full Ethereum blockchain is a major win for public blockchains, decentralization, and more. Because you can imagine JPMorgan Bank sitting as king of the hill. They would have loved to have everyone use their quorum, or it's not called Konexus. Their Konexus private chain, and they would get all of Wall Street to use it. But that's not the case. And this is where we won, folks. They tried to fight the public blockchains. It's why they weaponized Gary Ganser, Elizabeth Warren, to attack the industry, unlawfully attacked the industry. And we have won, guys. So as the saying goes, first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win. So this is massive. So JPMorgan's dollar deposit token is heading to Ethereum as the lender looks to offer it to a wider selection of institutional clients. Big move here.

The bank chose Ethereum because the blockchain offers more liquidity and rival networks, and is already used by institutional clients. Emma Landrialt, the head of Kinexis Labs at JPMorgan's blockchain division, Kinexis said in an interview with Bloomberg, which reported the news earlier. Here's a quote. Issuing JPM coin on base and now on Ethereum is a meaningful step towards providing our institutional clients with multi-chain optionality of moving wholesale money across both the Web3 and traditional financial ecosystems, she said in an email statement.

Huge, huge win for public blockchains, huge win for crypto.

And if you caught my recent interview with Todd McDonald of R3, they are the developer of Corda, which of course is a private chain. But even they, and if you saw the interview, you know, they are now bridging to Solana, so a public chain, right? So this is where the folks who are building these private chains, who wanted to overtake public chains have lost. And now they have to bridge the public chains to survive and to grow the ecosystem. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying all private chains will disappear or die. I believe they will exist in, within the ecosystems of these banks and institutions. But if they want to do, get liquidity, they want to get settlement, they got to bridge to the public chains. And that's where you and I can hold the token of the public chains. So again, we have one. And you can imagine Jamie Dimon not happy about this, but he can do nothing about it, because they did try with Gary Gensler and more to try to kill the public chains, but it didn't happen. We won, guys. So huge capitulation as mentioned. And just an example of where things are headed. And you can imagine over time, they are going to launch their JPM Coin and other blockchains like Solana and others. So get ready for that news. It will happen over time. And speaking of banks, Europe's largest banking network, Sparkason, launches crypto trading, allowing customers to buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP and Solana. So the banks are building the massive on-ramps globally. We are seeing this happen across the globe. Stock exchanges, banks, the largest asset managers and financial institutions are building crypto products, whether it be trading, custody, they're tokenizing, they're launching their own stable coin or integrating stable coins. Everybody's moving in the same direction. We've talked a lot about the banks recently.