J.P. Morgan has put its dollar deposit token on a second public blockchain. The bank's institutional clients can now use JPM Coin (ticker: JPMD) on Ethereum's main Layer 1 network, Kinexys, the bank's blockchain unit, said on 19 October 2026. Until this week, Base, the Layer 2 network Coinbase built on top of Ethereum, was the only public blockchain it ran on.
JPM Coin is a deposit token, not a stablecoin. Each unit represents a US dollar deposit at J.P. Morgan, so the holder's claim sits with a regulated bank rather than a separate issuer managing a reserve pool. Regulators keep drawing that line, as the Bank of England and FCA did with their systemic stablecoin regime.
What changes for clients
Clients can now hold and send JPMD on Ethereum as well as on Base. According to the bank, institutional clients can transfer the token directly to one another anywhere in the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) ecosystem, which includes both networks. The bank argues that clients should not have to leave the chain where they trade to settle. The dollar can now live next to the positions it pays for.
Why Ethereum? Kinexys says the network already holds deep on-chain liquidity and plenty of tokenised assets. The bank is not new to the network. Its asset management arm, J.P. Morgan Asset Management, put tokenised money market funds on Ethereum earlier in 2026, according to the release notes. That pairing of onchain cash with onchain funds follows the path set by products such as Franklin Templeton's BENJI fund.
Kinexys also floats longer term uses, seeing the token underpin automated treasury functions that clients could run from their own wallets.
"Tokenized financial infrastructure is no longer theoretical. It's already restructuring liquidity, settlement, and digital asset workflows. Issuing JPM Coin first on Base and now on Ethereum is a meaningful step towards providing our institutional clients with multi-chain optionality for moving wholesale money across both the web3 and traditional finance ecosystems," by Emma Landriault of Kinexys by J.P. Morgan
From pilot to two chains in 16 months
The token has moved quickly. Kinexys ran a proof of concept on Base in June 2025 and, in November 2025, opened JPMD to institutional clients there after B2C2, Coinbase, and Mastercard tested issuing and redeeming it. Ethereum is the first expansion since that launch.
The Base launch also set out how the token was meant to grow. J.P. Morgan said the token was built so smart contracts could use it, leaving room for later automation, and Mastercard said it would bring JPM Coin onto the Mastercard Token Network. Matthew Dawson, a co-founder of Ethereum Institutional, said in the Ethereum release that the move fits that track record, pointing out that the Kinexys platform is itself built on EVM technology.
Kinexys also gave a sense of scale. It says its platform has handled more than $4 trillion in transactions since it started, averaging about $7 billion a day. Those totals are for the Kinexys platform as a whole, not JPM Coin alone.
Other regulated institutions are moving in the same direction. In the United States, Fiserv's digital asset platform went live with the Bank of North Dakota's Roughrider Coin, a dollar token issued by VersaBank in partnership with the state owned Bank of North Dakota, which again keeps a regulated bank at the centre rather than a crypto native issuer.
Canton remains a plan
The Ethereum rollout is separate from a plan Kinexys and Digital Asset, the company behind the Canton Network, set out on 7 January 2026. That announcement stated an intent to issue JPM Coin natively on Canton, a blockchain built with privacy features for institutional markets. They gave no go-live date, saying only that the integration would be staged across 2026 and that J.P. Morgan's Blockchain Deposit Accounts might follow later. Neither has announced that JPMD is live on Canton.
What compliance teams should watch
For institutions weighing JPMD on a public chain, the open questions are operational rather than technical. These include who can hold the token, how wallets are controlled and screened, and how transfers between counterparties are monitored for sanctions and financial crime risk. The 19 October release does not cover those controls, so clients will need to settle them directly with the bank before moving wholesale payments onto Ethereum.
