JPMorgan Shifts JPM Coin from Private Kinexys Blockchain to Coinbase’s Public Network in Major Crypto Pivot

Wall Street's blockchain experiment just went public. JPMorgan is moving its digital token off a walled garden and onto the open web.

The Private-to-Public Shift

For years, JPM Coin operated on a private, permissioned blockchain—think of it as the bank's own, members-only financial playground. That changes now. The migration to Coinbase's public Base network isn't just a technical upgrade; it's a philosophical U-turn. It signals a bet that the future of institutional finance is interoperable, transparent, and built on public infrastructure.

Why This Move Matters

This isn't a quiet backend switch. It's a loud declaration. By choosing a public chain, JPMorgan is effectively endorsing the resilience and innovation of decentralized networks over the controlled, but limited, environments of private ledgers. It opens JPM Coin to a universe of developers, applications, and liquidity it could never access on its old chain. The bank is trading absolute control for vast potential.

The Bigger Picture for Finance

The move cuts through the industry's long-standing hypocrisy. Banks have spent years touting 'blockchain, not bitcoin'—embracing the technology while dismissing its most revolutionary asset. Now, a titan is leveraging the very public rails built by the crypto ecosystem it once scorned. It's a masterclass in pragmatic adoption, even if it comes with a side of irony for the legacy finance crowd who still think digital gold is a fad.

One thing's clear: when a fortress bank starts dismantling its own walls, the landscape is changing for good. The race to rebuild finance on open networks just gained its most formidable participant.

JPMorgan product head: Base is important for institutional customers

JPMorgan’s blockchain payments initiative began as a tightly controlled experiment. The original JPMD allowed approved institutional customers to MOVE tokenized bank deposits internally, settling payments around the clock exclusively on Kinexys. 

The new deployment on Base is the first time JPMorgan has fully migrated the deposit token to a public blockchain environment. Basak Toprak, Product Head of Deposit Tokens at JPMorgan’s Kinexys Digital Payments unit, said the motive behind migrating to base was due to demand.

“Right now, the only cash or cash equivalent option available on public chains is stablecoins,” Toprak said in a recent interview. “There is a demand for making payments on public chains using a bank deposit product. We thought this was particularly important for institutional customers.”

Coinbase’s public blockchain has cheaper transactions than Ethereum’s main network, although it has the security capabilities of the most used DeFi network. JPMD’s arrival on Base was greeted with enthusiasm in some corners of the crypto industry, where proponents celebrated the linking of the bank’s payments coin to the US’s largest crypto exchange.

However, according to Toprak, there’s not much to celebrate because “a payment is a payment.”

“Cash is used as collateral today in traditional finance, so it can be used as collateral in the blockchain world as well. There’s nothing new about it,” she explained.

Many of the crypto-native banking firms already interact with Coinbase for trading, custody, and collateral management. That existing relationship makes Base the go-to venue for settling obligations using tokenized bank deposits, the product head of tokenized deposits said.

Is JPMD a stablecoin? 

Margin payments and collateral transfers are mostly handled through stablecoins or through traditional bank accounts off-chain, each approach having its limitations. Bank accounts have cutoff times and settlement delays, and stablecoins come with different risk considerations for institutions accustomed to regulated bank deposits.

“So that’s the use case they are looking to adopt and use: JPM Coin as a means to either keep collateral or make margin payments for transactions related to their crypto purchases, for example,” Toprak continued.

Much different from open stablecoins, JPMD is permissioned and can only be transferred between whitelisted clients that have completed JPMorgan’s onboarding process. That structure enables the bank to extend its deposit-taking business onto public infrastructure without relinquishing control over compliance or token governance.

“Deposits are obviously the dominant FORM of money today in the traditional world, and we think very strongly that they should have their place in the onchain world as well,” Toprak said.

She also admitted deploying on a public blockchain required years of internal preparation, but reiterated that JPMorgan worked to satisfy governance, compliance, and risk teams.

“That is the work we’ve done over the past years. We showed to our internal teams that we can do this in a very controlled way, because we are controlling the smart contract,” she added. 

Brian Foster, Coinbase’s Global Head of Wholesale, coined the term tokenized deposits the “cousin of stablecoins.” 

“I’m not here to tell you that one is better than the other; the market’s going to tell us that. I think banks need to figure out: ‘How do I export this?’ How do I get distribution for this new product outside of the four walls of my bank?” Foster reckoned.

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