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.
I had a landlord who personally knew the Johnson brothers when he was a child, and he rode their steam boat on the Raritan River. The landlord told me what wonderful people the brothers were because just before the Great Depression, they went around New Brunswick telling all the “right” families how to invest so that they could control the money in town. Then, they used that capital and the rest of the town’s destitution to drive out all the minorities and undesirables.
This was one of the least racist or disturbing things I heard come from that man’s mouth.