JPMorgan Chase & Co. plans to allow institutional clients to use their holdings of Bitcoin and Ether as collateral for loans by the end of the year in a significant deepening of Wall Street’s crypto integration.
The program, offered globally, will rely on a third-party custodian to safeguard the pledged tokens, according to people familiar with the matter. It builds on JPMorgan’s earlier move to accept crypto-linked ETFs as collateral.
A JPMorgan spokesperson declined to comment.
The expansion underscores how quickly crypto is being pulled into the financial system’s core plumbing. With Bitcoin rallying this year and the Trump administration rolling back regulatory hurdles, major banks are starting to bring digital assets deeper into the lending system.
For JPMorgan, it’s both a symbolic shift and a functional one: the bank whose chief executive, Jamie Dimon, earlier dismissed Bitcoin as a “hyped-up fraud” or a “pet rock” is no longer treating crypto as a fringe bet. Instead, it will be pledged as security for a loan, the same way stocks, bonds, gold and other familiar assets are.
The next financial collapse is gonna be titanic.
And thanks to the fact that they’ve now brought cryptocurrency into economic calculations, any financial crash will take down cryptocurrencies too. So the one thing that they kind of do actually have a use for, protecting financial assets from economic collapse, will be destroyed as well. Fantastic.
Everyone should probably just start investing in gold or something.