Regardless of JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon repeatedly slamming Bitcoin (BTC) as “a hyped-up fraud” and “pet rock,” in addition to evaluating the most important cryptocurrency to a Ponzi scheme, the American banking big continues to advance within the cryptocurrency sector.
Particularly, JPMorgan’s decentralized finance (DeFi) department Onyx is opening an Innovation Lab in Athens, Greece, “with initial focus on building blockchain-related capabilities,” the platform’s Head of Distributed ledger technology Launch and Onyx Digital Property, Tyrone Lobban, mentioned in a LinkedIn put up on February 13.
Athens group’s obligations
As Lobban defined, the lab’s launch is a part of the corporate’s efforts in direction of increasing the idea of digital identification, which it considers important for the additional development of its Web3 providers:
“The Athens team will form part of Onyx Blockchain Launch and will be core to the exploration and build-out of Digital Identity solutions, extending the capabilities we have piloted over the past few years. We believe that Digital Identity is key to unlocking scale for web3 and can enable entirely new interactions and services for web2 and web3 alike.”
To this finish, Lobban urged gifted engineers who “want to work at the cutting edge of blockchain, identity & web3 in Athens,” to use for the platform’s new positions in Greece, which embrace full-stack software program engineers, a cell app engineer, and Onyx Launch technical supervisor.
JPMorgan’s enlargement into crypto
It is usually essential to notice that, in November, JPMorgan registered a trademark with the US Patent and Trademark Workplace (USPTO) for ‘J.P. MORGAN WALLET,’ in search of to supply a crypto pockets for digital foreign money alternate and switch, which the USPTO later granted.
Moreover, JPMorgan’s subsidiary Chase Financial institution permits its U.S. account holders to accumulate crypto by a regulated dealer or alternate, so long as it’s registered with the Monetary Crimes Enforcement Community (FinCEN) and allowed to promote digital belongings like Bitcoin and Ethereum (ETH).
The elevated crypto-related efforts appear to be a response to the elevated public curiosity in cryptocurrencies, which the corporate acknowledged by analyzing its purchasers’ actions, arriving on the conclusion that just about 13% of all households had moved cash into or out of a crypto account at the very least as soon as as of June 2022.