IOHK CEO & Cardano creator Charles Hoskinson has a few choice words for JP Morgan and its new stablecoin, JPM Coin.
During the recently held Hybrid Summit in Hong Kong, Hoskinson didn’t shy away from lambasting JP Morgan and its strategic move into the crypto sphere, calling the investment bank’s new digital asset an “abomination,” while generalizing bankers as “criminals.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsBz3lVazvs
As Hoskinson branded JP Morgan’s foray into the crypto industry:
“I saw the JP Morgan Coin, and listen – you guys just don’t get this space. You don’t know how any of these things work. It’s an abomination of a concept. First: They are the Federal Reserve.”
Underscoring the pointlessness of JPM Coin’s existence, the Ethereum c-founder went on adding:
“They run the whole damn show. Them and five or six other entities. And there’s absolutely no need or utility behind what they’ve created. It’s just a proof of concept for the sake of being a proof of concept to say that they’re in the space, and they can justify some sort of bizarre executive fantasy.”
Further berating the traditional banking industry over its ill-conceived systems and regulatory measures that have purportedly left billions unbanked, Hoskinson further pointed out that:
“The whole reason we exist is because these guys are criminals. They’ve done horrible things over the last few decades. They’ve bankrupted the world, and they’ve excluded three billion people from the world financial systems as a consequence of their regulations and the systems they’ve put into play. And the whole world is living the consequences of their malfeasance and poor decisions. And so, as a counter reaction, the cryptocurrency exists and it continues to grow, and it will continue to gain relevance. And eventually it will collide with the legacy system.”
As Hoskinson concluded:
“But I see these things as the last vestiges of a dying industry trying to achieve some form of relevance. And I have very little respect for this type of work. I don’t see it as a positive thing.”
Meanwhile, Hoskinson also highlighted how his tech company IOHK is working on revolutionizing governments by providing a number of blockchain-based solutions that can be readily adopted by local leaders.
Elaborating on the company’s objective, Hoskinson emphasized:
“We modernize blockchain technology. Everything from property and business registration to voting systems to supply chain management, across to as many verticals as we can find. Once you have blockchain tech, you have digital identities, you have wallets, and then you can link them to permissionless systems like Cardano and Ethereum, and give them access to credit, insurance, remittances and these types of things.
While Hoskinson recognizes that such a feat would be “a slow, methodical march, and it takes quite a bit of time,” he emphasized that “it’s very meaningful work,” adding that:
“We actually get to start from nothing, and eventually build up to something quite significant, and collectively can end up eventually capturing trillions of dollars of value.”
Further elaborating on the global impact caused by the traditional Western financial system, Hoskinson explained that:
“One of the biggest problems in emerging economies is they tend to be the battle field of empires old and current, where these foreign actors come and they kind of take the resources. They take the value, and they don’t leave much behind. So it’s created a great degree of suspicion when you show up and you say, ‘I have this solution that’s going to solve all your problems. It’s here for all your ills, just trust me, and give me all the control and money, and I’ll somehow deliver you to the promised land. That’s patronizing. A lot of people have died. A lot of problems have occurred from that. So you have to present technology in a way that it can be absorbed from the bottom up, and controlled from the bottom up – by the locals. So that’s part of our strategy. We go in, and we train people.”
“The country owns part of it. The locals own part of it, and we own part of it. And ultimately the solution is deployed and maintained by local partners and by employees on the ground,” Hoskinson underscored.
As it stands, JP Morgan has already been fined over $29.7 billion over multiple offenses, including anti-money laundering oversight, mortgage schemes, as well as toxic securities, according to the violation tracker on Good Jobs First.
