Jamie Dimon: 'Bitcoin Is a Fraud'

On 12 September 2017, at a banking conference run by Barclays, Jamie Dimon was asked about Bitcoin. The chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States, did not hedge. "It's a fraud," he said. "It's worse than tulip bulbs. It won't end well. Someone is going to get killed." Any JPMorgan trader caught dealing in it, he added, would be fired "in a second, for two reasons: It is against our rules and they are stupid."

Bitcoin fell about 2% on the day, to $4,106, CNBC reported. Three months later it was close to $20,000. On 16 October 2026 it trades at about $82,000, roughly twenty times the price on the day he called it a fraud. JPMorgan, meanwhile, now lets its clients buy it.

The man and the quote

Dimon has run JPMorgan since the end of 2005 and steered it through the 2008 financial crisis. When he speaks, markets listen, which is why the 2017 remark went round the world. Its timing made it sharper. That same afternoon, at a CNBC conference, he said one of his daughters had bought some Bitcoin. "It went up and she thinks she's a genius now," he said, according to Reuters.

He partly walked it back once. On 9 January 2018 he told Fox Business that he regretted calling Bitcoin a fraud and that the blockchain technology behind it was real, Reuters reported. It did not last. On 21 September 2022 he told the House Financial Services Committee that crypto tokens were "decentralized Ponzi schemes", as Bloomberg and Fortune reported, while saying properly regulated stablecoins were not a problem. At a Senate Banking Committee hearing on 6 December 2023, questioned by Senator Elizabeth Warren, he went further: "If I was the government, I'd close it down," Fortune and The Block reported. "I've always been deeply opposed to crypto, bitcoin, etc."

In January 2024, a week after US regulators approved the first spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, stock-market funds that hold real Bitcoin and trade like a share, he told CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos that it would be the last time he discussed the subject on that channel. "I call it the pet rock," he said, according to Fortune. He said its real uses were money laundering, fraud, sex trafficking and tax avoidance.

What the bank did instead

While the chief executive talked, the bank built. In February 2019 JPMorgan announced JPM Coin, a digital token backed one for one by dollars held at the bank, used to move money instantly between its large corporate clients. Think of it as a bank deposit that can travel on a blockchain, the shared digital ledger that also records Bitcoin. In October 2020 the bank grouped its blockchain work into a unit called Onyx, renamed Kinexys in November 2024.

When the Bitcoin funds launched in January 2024, JPMorgan was named as an authorised participant for BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust, the largest of them. An authorised participant is the market-making firm that creates and redeems fund shares, the plumbing that keeps the fund's price in line with Bitcoin. The bank that called Bitcoin a fraud was now helping keep the biggest Bitcoin fund running.

The bigger turn came at JPMorgan's investor day on 19 May 2025. Dimon announced that the bank would let its clients buy Bitcoin. "We're not going to custody it," he said, meaning the bank would not hold the coins itself. "We're going to put it in statements for clients." Then came the line that summed up his position. He compared Bitcoin to smoking, which he disapproves of but would not ban: "I defend your right to buy bitcoin," he said, as NBC News and Bloomberg reported. In the same speech he again listed money laundering, "the sex trafficking, the terrorism" among its uses.

The bank kept moving. In June 2025 Bloomberg reported that it would accept shares in Bitcoin funds, starting with BlackRock's, as collateral for loans, much as a broker lends against a share portfolio. In October Bloomberg reported that it planned to let institutional clients borrow against Bitcoin and Ether themselves by the end of 2025, with the coins held by an outside custodian. In December 2025 Bloomberg reported that JPMorgan was considering offering spot and derivatives crypto trading to institutional clients. The discussions were described as preliminary, and the bank had no plans to offer custody.

2026: blockchain as a rival, Bitcoin as a pet rock

Dimon's own tone has not softened toward Bitcoin, but it has changed toward the technology underneath it. At Davos in January 2026, according to The Wall Street Journal, he told Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong "You are full of s---" during an argument over the CLARITY Act, the US crypto market-structure bill. The fight was about stablecoins, crypto tokens pegged to the dollar, and whether exchanges such as Coinbase should be allowed to pay interest-like rewards on them. Banks say that would pull deposits out of the banking system; Armstrong says banks should compete. CoinDesk, which reported the WSJ account, noted that the quote came from people familiar with the exchange.

In his annual letter to shareholders, published on 6 April 2026, Dimon wrote that "a whole new set of competitors is emerging based on blockchain", naming stablecoins, smart contracts (code that moves money by itself) and tokenization, and that it "may change the fundamental nature of how all this is done". His answer: "We need to roll out our own blockchain technology and continually focus on what our customers want." The letter did not endorse Bitcoin, CoinDesk reported.

So the position in October 2026 is a split one. The man still calls Bitcoin a pet rock with criminal uses. The bank he runs lets clients buy it, lends against it, helps run the largest Bitcoin fund and is building its own blockchain. In 2017 he threatened to fire any trader who touched it. In 2025 he defended his clients' right to buy it. The word "fraud" has not come back, and neither has the $4,106 price.