Not a cryptocurrency. End of.
The media recently reported, somewhat breathlessly (eg, CNBC), that JP Morgan Chase (JPMC)is launching a “cryptocurrency to transform the payments business”. This sounded amazing so I was very excited to learn more about this great leap forward in the future history of money.
As CNBC reported, it seems to herald new forms of business. Umar Farooq, the head of JPMC's blockchain projects, sets put this vision clearly, saying that the applications for this innovative use of new transaction technology "are frankly quite endless; anything where you have a distributed ledger which involves corporations or institutions can use this."
Wow.
Now, many people took a look at this and pointed out that it is simply JPMC deposits by another name, and uncharitable persons (of whom I am not one) therefore dismissed it as a marketing gimmick. But it is more interesting than that. Here is the problem that it is trying to solve...
Suppose I am running apps (referred to by less well-informed media commentators as "smart" "contracts" when they are neither) on JPMC's Quorum blockchain. Quorum is, in the terminology that I developed along with Richard Brown (CTO of R3) and my colleague Salome Parulava, their double-permissioned Ethereum fork (that is, it requires permission to access it and a further permission to take part in the consensus-forming process). I’m quite partial to Quorum (this is what I wrote about it back in 2017) and am always interested to see how it is developing and helping to define what I call the Enterprise Shared Ledger (ESL) software category.
Now suppose my Quorum app wants to make a payment - not in imaginary internet play money, but in US dollars - in return for some service. How can it do this? Remember that our apps can't send a wire transfer or use a credit card because they can only access data on the blockchain. If the app has to pay using a credit card, and that app could be executing on a thousand nodes in the blockchain network, then you would have a thousand credit card payments all being fired off within a few seconds! You can see why this can’t work.
One way to solve this problem would be to have "oracles" reporting on the state of bank accounts to the blockchain and "watchers” (or “custom executors” as Darius calls them here) looking for state changes in the blockchain bank accounts that they could then instruct in the actual bank accounts. But that would mean putting the safe-to-spend limits for millions of bank accounts on to the blockchain. Another more practical solution would be to add tokens to Quorum and allow the apps to send these tokens to one another. This is, as far as I can tell from a distance, is what JPM Coins are for.
I have to say that this is a fairly standard way of approaching this problem. A couple of months ago, Signature Bank of New York, launched just such a service for corporate customers — with a minimum $250,000 balance — using another permissioned Ethereum fork, similarly converting Uncle Sam’s dollars into ERC-20 tokens. If you’re interested, I gave a presentation to the Dutch Blockchain Innovation Conference last year on this approach and why I think it will grow and the video is online [23 minutes].)
Animal, vegetable or mineral?
These JPM Coins (I simply cannot resist calling them Dimon Dollars, or $Dimon, for obvious reasons) have attracted considerable discussion but I thought I might contribute something different to the debate by trying to reason my way through to a categorisation. I talked about this on the panel in the “Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies” session at Merchant Payments Ecosystem in Berlin today, and you can see my slides here:
Blockchains and Blockheads from David Birch
On the panel, I said that the $Dimon is e-money. Here's why...
Is it “money”? No it isn’t. It is certainly a cryptoasset - a digital asset that has an institutional binding to a real-world asset - that in certain circumstances exhibits money-like behaviour. Personally, I am happy to classify such assets as forms of digital money, the logical reason that they are bearer instruments that can be traded without clearing or settlement.
Is it a “cryptocurrency”? No, it isn’t. A cryptocurrency has a value determined, essentially, by mathematics in that the algorithm to produce the currency is known and the value of the cryptocurrency depends only that known supply and the unknown demand (and, of course, market manipulation of various kinds). It is not set by an institution, government or otherwise.
Is it a “stablecoin”? No, it is isn’t. A stablecoin has its value maintained at a certain level with reference to a fiat currency by managing the supply of the coins. But the value of the $Dimon is maintained by the institution of JP Morgan irrespective of the demand for it.
Is it a “currency board”? No, it isn’t. A currency board maintains the value of one currency using a reserve in another currency. So, for example, you might have a Zimbabwean currency board that issues Zim Dollars against a 100% reserve of South African Rand.
In fact, as far as I can tell, the $Dimon is e-money, which is one particular kind of digital money. There are two main reasons for this:
First, according to the EU Directive 2009/110/EC, “Electronic money” is defined as “electronically, including magnetically, stored monetary value as represented by a claim on the issuer which is issued on receipt of funds for the purpose of making payment transactions […], and which is accepted by a natural or legal person other than the electronic money issuer”. This sounds awfully like, as Bloomberg put it, the $Dimon is "a digital coin representing United States Dollars held in designated accounts at JPMorgan Chase N.A.”. It is a bearer instrument (so “coin” is a reasonable appellation) that entitles the holder to obtain a US dollar from that bank and therefore seems to fall within that EU definition since people other than JPMC, albeit customers of JPMC, accept it in payment. (I would pull back from calling it digital cash because of this need to establish an account with JPMC in order to hold it.)
Second, because my good friend Simon Lelieveldt, who knows more about electronic money than almost anyone else, says so. Simon and I have long agreed that the trading of digital assets in the form of tokens is the most interesting aspect of current developments in cryptocurrency, a point I made more than once in my MPE talk.
Best speaker at MPE is Dave Birch! Call it as it is and no bs taken from other speakers! #mpe2019 https://t.co/cCYayi1NMF
— Kevin D Murphy (@KevinMurphyIE)
Following my logic then, in European regulatory terms then, the $Dimon is “e-money” and I think that is a quite reasonable definition. Case closed.