Why America’s Biggest Bank Digs Anonymous Cryptocurrency

A JPMorgan collaboration with the tiny startup Zcash shows how serious financial institutions are about blockchain technology. Whatever JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon meant last month when he called Bitcoin a “fraud,” he sure doesn’t seem to view its blockchain in the same light. His bank is at the forefront of the effort to adapt the technology for use in the financial industry. Even more surprising, though, is JPMorgan’s collaboration with the people behind a digital currency that’s like Bitcoin except completely anonymous. It would be understandable if Dimon and other bank CEOs viewed Bitcoin and its cryptocurrency siblings as a threat. After all, Bitcoin, launched during the height of the Great Recession, shows it’s possible to use software and thousands of computers connected via the Internet—instead of a bank—to facilitate the peer-to-peer exchange of money. The computers in the network maintain a secure ledger of every transaction, called a blockchain, and use it to prevent counterfeiting (see “What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters”). No matter what bank executives think about Bitcoin’s currency, though, they see in its blockchain a revolutionary platform that could lead to more secure, reliable, and cost-effective systems for managing all kinds of financial transactions. It’s early, though, and most of the work on so-called “enterprise blockchains” is experimental. What’s not yet clear is the degree to which financial institutions can adapt the technology to their own needs without sacrificing its advantages—particularly its decentralized nature, which is key to protecting the information in the ledger from getting corrupted.