JPMorgan Chase and consultants Oliver Wyman took a look at blockchain technology in commercial banking in a report released Feb. 9. Stablecoin and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) have dominated in this sphere so far, but the authors pointed out the advantages offered by deposit coins for stability and reliability. Deposit tokens are issued on a blockchain by a depository institution to represent a deposit claim. This contrasts to stablecoins, commonly issued by a non-bank private entity, and CBDCs. This difference in issuer is a key advantage: “Given that deposit tokens are commercial bank money embodied in a new technical …

Michael Demissie, the head of digital assets at Bank of New York Mellon (BNY Mellon) is adamant that the cryptocurrency market fall in 2022 won’t waver institutional interest in digital assets. At a conference run by Afore Consulting on Feb. 8, Demissie said the digital asset industry is “here to stay” as institutional investors have held a strong interest in crypto. "What we see is clients are absolutely interested in digital assets, broadly,” he said, according to a Feb. 8 report from Reuters. Demissie backed up his thoughts by referencing a survey conducted by BNY Mellon in October, 2022, which …

A whopping 72% of institutional e-traders have signaled “no plans to trade crypto/digital coins” in 2023, according to a new survey conducted by JPMorgan. The seventh edition of JPMorgan’s e-Trading Edit surveyed 835 traders from 60 different “global locations” about the technical developments and macroeconomic factors that will influence trading performance in 2023. The survey was conducted between Jan. 3 to Jan. 23, 2023. The survey revealed hesitation among traders around digital assets. Only 14% of respondents said they will either continue to trade in the digital asset market or begin trading this year. The remaining 14% of respondents, said …

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase won’t escape from the profitability challenges it will face from the crypto market downturn, despite having a strong brand and credibility in the crypto market, according to investment analysts. Credit rating firm Moody’s released a note on Coinbase on Jan. 19 discussing its downgrade of Coinbase’s senior debt and corporate family rating (CFR) — a rating assigned to reflect the opinion of a company’s ability to honor its financial obligations. Coinbase’s CFR and senior debt were re-graded to B2 and B1 from Ba3 and Ba2 respectively, indicating the firm is “non-investment grade” and “speculative and subject to …

Big institutional investors are still largely staying away from the crypto market, as the asset class' volatility poses a challenge to money managers, Jared Gross, head of institutional portfolio strategy at JPMorgan Asset Management, told Bloomberg. “As an asset class, crypto is effectively nonexistent for most large institutional investors,” Gross noted, explaining that “the volatility is too high, the lack of an intrinsic return that you can point to makes it very challenging.” Gross believes that most institutional investors are currently "breathing a sigh of relief that they didn’t jump into that market", which is unlikely to happen anytime soon. …

What do the cryptocurrency and porn industries have in common? As it turns out, both are frequent targets of the traditional financial system, which has been known to ban the accounts of both crypto traders and sex workers. On this week’s episode of the newly launched podcast The Agenda, Cointelegraph senior copy editor Jonathan DeYoung and head of markets Ray Salmond speak to Allie Rae, an adult content creator and CEO of WetSpace — a crypto-focused alternative to OnlyFans. Rae first exploded into the mainstream when she lost her job as an ICU nurse after her colleagues discovered her hobby …

Around 13% of the American population — or 43 million people — have held cryptocurrency at some point in their lives, new research from JPMorgan Chase has revealed. According to a Dec. 13 report titled: "The Dynamics and Demographics of U.S. Household Crypto-Asset Use,” this number has risen dramatically since before 2020 when the figure was only around 3%. The latest data from JPMorgan comes from analyzing checking account transfers from a sample of over 5 million customers. It found that 600,000 customers in this sample group transferred cash to crypto accounts at some point during the 2020-2022 time period. …

Pundits are calling the collapse of the FTX exchange the end of cryptocurrency and venture capitalism related to it. But it’s not. Some of them anointed Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried “The King of Crypto” — and then summarily killed the king. But, in reality, crypto never had a king. The end of FTX may mark the end of Americans using unregulated exchanges, and it certainly is the end of exchange-native tokens, but crypto itself hasn’t changed one bit. In reality, the FTX collapse is a symptom of a deeper problem, which is traditional finance’s “profit at any cost” mentality. For all …

Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you significant developments over the last week. The first week of November proved to be the institutionalization of DeFi markets as major international banks and financial institutions executed and completed their first DeFi transaction. The global financial giant JP Morgan completed its first-ever cross-border transaction using DeFi on a public blockchain with the help of the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) Project Guardian. DBS Bank started a trading test of foreign exchange (FX) and government securities using permissioned DeFi liquidity pools. …

In the past year, Polygon (MATIC) has focused on growing their list of high-profile partners which includes luminaries like Disney, Starbucks and Robinhood. The recent announcements of partnerships with both Instagram and JPMorgan have speculators pushing the token price up nearly 200%. In addition to partnerships, blockchain adoption through network usage is important to analyze. Blockchain adoption can be analyzed by looking into daily active users of the blockchain, protocols using the technology, number of transactions and total locked value. Total value locked on Polygon rises above $1B Total value locked (TVL) is one cryptocurrency indicator used to assess the …

Polygon (MATIC) emerged as the best-performing asset among the top-ranking cryptocurrencies on Nov. 3 as the market's attention turned to the latest Instagram and JPMorgan announcements. Polygon in high-profile partnerships Notably, Meta, the parent company of Instagram, named Polygon as its initial partner for its upcoming nonfungible token (NFT) tools that allow users to mint, showcase, and sell their digital collectibles on and off the social media platform. Meanwhile, banking giant JPMorgan used Polygon to conduct its first live trade (worth about $71,000) on a public blockchain, marking a concrete step toward integrating cryptocurrencies into the traditional financial frameworks. MATIC, …

Multinational banking firm JP Morgan has successfully executed its first ever cross-border transaction using decentralized finance (DeFi) on a public blockchain. The trade was facilitated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) Project Guardian on Nov. 2 — which was established as part of a pilot program to “explore potential decentralized finance (DeFi) applications in wholesale funding markets.” In other words, the pilot was another step into examining how traditional financial institutions can use tokenized assets and DeFi protocols to conduct financial transactions, among other use cases. Singapore’s largest bank — DBS Bank, Tokyo-based banking firm SBI Digital Asset Holdings …