Ripple CEO Bashes JPM Coin, Claiming That “Other Banks Won’t Use It”

The head of the San Francisco-based blockchain startup Ripple, Brad Garlinghouse, is in the crypto news today for giving JP Morgan Chase a qualified praise for creating their own stablecoin – before bashing the product’s likelihood of being adopted by other banks.

Garlinghouse questioned the usefulness of the JPM altcoin during a fireside chat art the Chamber of Digital Commerce’s DC Blockchain Summit in Washington. As he said, it is “great” to have major financial players such as JP Morgan “leaning in” on the market.

However, he also noted:

“That’s the only nice thing I’m going to say about this.”

Garlinghouse, whose company has been courting financial institutions to use its distributed ledger (DLT) for payments – cast his doubts for the recently announced JPM Coin token.

As he recalled from  another conference last week:

“This guy from Morgan Stanley was interviewing me, I said ‘So, is Morgan Stanley going to use the JPM Coin?’ And he said ‘probably not.’ So, well is Citi going to use the JPM Coin? Is BBVA? Is PNC? And the answer is no.”

Hence, he suggested that a bank creating its own stablecoin risks recreating the very problems that DLT is supposed to solve.

“So, does that mean we’re going to have all these different coins? Are we back to where we are with lack of interoperability? I don’t get it,” he questioned.

He wrapped his comments with a comment about a diplomatic note, concluding:

“Now, back to my first answer, if it solves the first [problem] of JPM leaning into crypto, yay. That’s all I got.”