JPMorgan Calls Most Crypto Assets Waste

Bitccoin, Ethereum, and XRP cryptocurrencies. (photo: doc. Pixabay)

JAKARTA The multinational investment and financial services bank from the US, JPMorgan, has its own blockchain unit. Umar Farooq is the CEO of blockchain unit on JPMorgan. In a recent statement, he stated that most cryptocurrencies are trash.

Farooq also believes most cryptocurrencies will disappear and leaves only a handful of those with essential utilities for the financial system. He believes cases of using crypto have not been fully exposed, while most of the current crypto assets are not that meaningful.

Launching CryptoPotato, Farooq spoke at the Green Shoots seminar of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) on Monday, Farooq said that the regulation had not yet followed the growing sector, thus blocking the entry of several traditional financial institutions.

Most of the crypto is still trash, I mean with the exception I would say, a few dozen tokens, everything mentioned is noise or frankly, just going away, Farooq said.

Farooq, who happens to be the head of JPMorgan's JPM Onyx, said that users will eventually move to financial institutions that are regulated to make "serious" large-value transactions, especially as infrastructure will be supported by the government and regulators. Therefore, the executive said that private options will always be in the sector.

While arguing that this sector is not yet mature enough, JPMorgan executives continued by saying that most of the capital in the Web 3 ecosystem at this stage is for speculative activities.

You need all that to mature so you can really do something with them. Right now, we haven't gotten there yet, most of the money used on Web3 right now, in today's infrastructure, is for speculative investment," he added.

Farooq's comments followed a new MAS directive in which he disclosed plans to turn off crypto speculation but did not hinder crypto innovation. In the seminar itself, Singapore's financial regulators have projected a consistent message that while the digital asset industry as a whole is quite promising. According to them, cryptocurrency trading is risky for non-professional investors. JPMorgan's own view reflects a common sentiment.

While in recent months, the cryptocurrency market has experienced a significant decline. Currently, the world's largest cryptocurrency by market cap, Bitcoin, is trading at a price of IDR 300 million per BTC. While number two cryptocurrency, Ethereum, is in the price range of IDR 23 million per ETH. BTC and ETH plunged 6.2% and 4.7% in the past week.