There was a time, not long ago, when respectable bankers spoke about public blockchains in the same tone one reserves for pyramid schemes, meme stocks and cousins with “trading systems”. This week, JPMorgan Asset Management launched its second tokenised money market fund, JLTXX, on public Ethereum. Not on a private bank-controlled ledger. Not in a walled garden with reassuring mahogany panelling. On Ethereum. The same Ethereum that was once dismissed as a playground for degens and cartoon apes.
This is the story now. The serious money has stopped laughing and started migrating. Tokenisation is no longer a conference panel about the future of finance. It is becoming plumbing. JPMorgan wants 24/7 liquidity and stablecoin-compatible collateral. BlackRock is already there. The prize is not crypto trading. It is the $400 trillion universe of global assets, most of which still moves with all the elegance of a fax machine.
Washington, for once, appears to have noticed. The Senate Banking Committee advanced the CLARITY Act this week, giving crypto-linked equities a lift and the industry its clearest legislative momentum in years. But the politics remain wonderfully Washingtonian. Banks say they support “clarity”, by which they mean clarity that does not allow stablecoins to compete too aggressively with deposits. Crypto firms want rules, provided those rules do not remove the parts of the business model that make money. The current compromise permits certain rewards while restricting interest on idle balances, which is less a settlement than a temporary ceasefire.
Outside America, the mood is less theological. The UAE has given Crypto.com a Stored Value Facilities licence, enabling Dubai residents to pay government fees with digital assets. This is not cypherpunk romance. It is state strategy. Digital money is being absorbed into public administration, payments policy and national competitiveness.
Asia offers the more important corrective. The lazy Western framing is that the future is a fight between stablecoins and CBDCs. In much of Asia, that is nonsense. India’s UPI and China’s Alipay have already solved many of the consumer payment frictions that stablecoin evangelists still rail against. For governments scarred by capital flight and wary of dollarisation, retail dollar-stablecoins look less like innovation than monetary leakage. The likely model is not one rail to rule them all, but a layered system: CBDCs and tokenised deposits for domestic sovereignty, stablecoins for cross-border and institutional use.
Meanwhile, non-dollar stablecoins are quietly becoming real. Euro stablecoins, helped by MiCA, are consolidating around Circle’s EURC, now one of the dominant euro-denominated assets in the category. This matters because the next phase of digital assets will not be won by ideology. It will be won by compliance, distribution, liquidity and dull operational usefulness.
And there lies the irony. Crypto promised to abolish intermediaries. Its next great boom may come from banks, card networks, sovereigns and regulated custodians rebuilding the old system on faster rails. The revolution is not dead. It has simply hired lawyers, obtained licences and moved into treasury operations.
