J.P. Morgan takes its JPMD deposit token to Ethereum mainnet

In the week of 19 October 2026 J.P. Morgan’s Kinexys brought JPM Coin (JPMD), its US dollar deposit token for institutional clients, to Ethereum mainnet. Every bank deposit token on the Pilot Scorecard in Singapore and Hong Kong runs on a private ledger or one its bank has not named. In Hong Kong, HSBC launched RedCoin, its first stablecoin, for the 3.3 million users of its PayMe app. Ethereum’s core developers also postponed the Glamsterdam upgrade on the Hoodi testnet, to check how a gas repricing affects contracts already on mainnet.

JPMD on Ethereum mainnet

On 19 October Kinexys by J.P. Morgan said it had brought JPM Coin (JPMD), “J.P. Morgan’s USD-denominated deposit token”, to Ethereum, which its release calls “the Layer 1 blockchain network” (J.P. Morgan). JPMD was already live on Base, an Ethereum layer 2 network. It is available only to J.P. Morgan’s institutional clients, for peer-to-peer transfers between them on Ethereum and Base. The release names no clients, no token standard and no Asian market, and does not say how holders are admitted. It places JPMD alongside J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s tokenised money market funds on Ethereum. Kinexys says it has handled more than US$4 trillion in cumulative transactions and about US$7 billion a day on average, by its own internal data.

A deposit token is a bank deposit recorded on a ledger: the holder is owed dollars by J.P. Morgan, as with an ordinary deposit, and the token moves that claim between holders. A stablecoin is a claim on an issuer’s reserve assets instead. Under the Hood sets out what each costs the bank and the holder.

The bank deposit tokens on the Pilot Scorecard in Singapore and Hong Kong run elsewhere. HSBC’s Tokenised Deposit Service in Hong Kong runs on HSBC’s own private network, and DBS Token Services in Singapore on DBS’s permissioned blockchain running Ethereum’s execution environment. OCBC’s tokenised deposits for Ant International move on Ant’s WhaleRTP platform, whose ledger is not stated. Partior, which DBS, J.P. Morgan and Temasek set up for interbank settlement in Singapore dollars and US dollars, has not named its ledger technology either.

Singapore’s rules already allow a bank to issue on a permissionless chain. MAS’s April 2026 capital proposal gives tokens on permissionless chains the lower Group 1 capital treatment when they meet requirements that include issuer freeze and correction powers, a documented point of finality, audited smart contracts and whitelisted wallets, and the treatment applies now within caps (State of Play). Hong Kong applies the Basel cryptoasset standard (State of Play), and the HKMA asks banks to take extra caution before relaxing controls for permissionless tokens (State of Play). J.P. Morgan is a member of BLOOM, MAS’s initiative on settlement in tokenised bank liabilities and regulated stablecoins (Annex A). On 9 October MAS’s Chia Der Jiun said stablecoins may have limits for settling large wholesale transactions, and named no chain for BLOOM’s settlement arrangements (Regulatory Wire).

J.P. Morgan has shown that a bank deposit token can run on a public chain, which makes the private ledgers HSBC and DBS use their own design choice. For DBS, MAS’s proposal sets the terms for moving to one. For HSBC in Hong Kong, the Basel standard puts tokens on permissionless chains in Group 2, so a public chain costs more capital (State of Play). Whether JPMD itself would meet MAS’s conditions is not shown: J.P. Morgan has not said how JPMD admits holders, and names no client in Asia.

Regulation

On 23 October MAS announced that Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand had joined BLOOM as policymaker members (MAS, para 1). MAS launched BLOOM in October 2025 for settlement in tokenised bank liabilities and regulated stablecoins. The three central banks will work with industry members on acceptance and settlement across jurisdictions, interoperability “across networks, infrastructures and borders”, and programmable controls such as identity verification and sanctions screening (para 5). Nine participants joined, among them Mastercard, Visa, Maybank, Ripple and the World Bank Group (para 4); existing members include Circle, DBS, J.P. Morgan, OCBC, Partior, StraitsX and UOB (Annex A). The release names no network or ledger, sets no timeline, and keeps each jurisdiction’s local requirements in place (para 3) (Regulatory Wire).

Pilots

On 23 October HSBC launched HSBC RedCoin (ticker RCHKD), its first stablecoin, on PayMe by HSBC, where it is available to more than 3.3 million users for payments to friends and family and at more than 100,000 merchants (HSBC). HSBC issues it under stablecoin issuer licence FRS02 from the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), one of the first two licences granted in April 2026. HSBC Digital Assets Custody holds RedCoin in safekeeping. HSBC says it will add a stablecoin wallet to its HSBC HK Mobile Banking App later this year, let customers subscribe to tokenised investment products with RedCoin, starting with a share class of its Hong Kong dollar money market fund, and expand into wholesale corporate and institutional uses. The release does not name the blockchain, or say how holders redeem RedCoin or whether they can send it outside PayMe.

Technology

On 22 October the Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol Cluster postponed the Glamsterdam upgrade on the Hoodi testnet, set for 26 October, “to allow for further investigation of interactions of EIP-8037 with mainnet smart contracts” (Ethereum Foundation). No new Hoodi date and no mainnet date is set, and the post says “no action is required from Ethereum mainnet users or ETH holders”. EIP-8037 raises the gas cost of adding to Ethereum’s state: writing a value to an empty storage slot rises from 20,000 to 97,920 gas. The EIP warns that contracts which measure their own work from remaining gas may see negative results, and “Contracts already deployed with such metering cannot be fixed.” It is in Last Call until 1 November. ChainSecurity argues that the repricing can change what a contract does after an external call fails, with no change to its code (ChainSecurity). Five pilots in Singapore and Hong Kong on the Pilot Scorecard run on Ethereum mainnet, among them Anchorpoint’s licensed stablecoin HKDAP (Weekly Brief No. 6). None of their issuers has said whether its contracts use the patterns the EIP describes.

On 23 October EthSystems, the privacy company spun out of the Ethereum Foundation, published a proof of concept for confidential money market fund shares on Ethereum (EthSystems). Each holding is a private note in a shared pool, spent with a zero-knowledge proof, so a public observer sees that a transfer happened but not the amount or the owner. Every note is also encrypted to the transfer agent’s key, so the agent can rebuild the fund’s register of record from the chain, and the agent can freeze, release or seize holdings. The pool sits behind ERC-3643 and DS Protocol token rules. EthSystems says the code “has not been audited”, names no institution or jurisdiction, and calls legal acceptance of the pool’s ledger “the open question” (code). I will be assessing it against Asian regulatory requirements.

On 23 October ERC-7963, “Oracle-Permissioned ERC-20 with ZK Proofs”, moved to Review (commit). Its authors are listed with Ant Group addresses. Under the proposal a token transfer is valid only when an external “Transfer Oracle” has approved it, against an offchain payment instruction in a standard JSON format, proven onchain with a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof. The permission rules sit in the oracle contract, so the token stays compatible with ERC-20, and the proposal names know-your-customer lists and travel-rule attestations as rules an oracle could apply. It says its reference implementation is illustrative and not for production. Under the Hood describes the whitelist designs in use on public chains today.

On the site

Regulatory Wire: MAS adds Bank Negara Malaysia and Bank of Thailand to BLOOM for cross-border settlement in digital money, 23 October.
Under the Hood: A bank that holds tokens for a client holds the keys, and the client holds a claim, 21 October.
Pilot Scorecard: the first pilots outside India, Singapore and Hong Kong, 13 in Japan and 2 in South Korea, 25 October.

What to watch

29 October: All Core Devs Consensus call #190 (Ethereum Magicians).
1 November: the Last Call deadline for EIP-8037 (EIP-8037).
5 November: All Core Devs Execution call #249, with Glamsterdam on the agenda (Ethereum Magicians).
30 November: comments close on MAS’s proposal that licensed stablecoin issuers join the Financial Industry Disputes Resolution Centre (State of Play).
No date: how JPMD admits holders on Ethereum, and any JPMD client named in Singapore or Hong Kong (J.P. Morgan).
No date: new Hoodi and mainnet dates for Glamsterdam (Ethereum Foundation).
No date: the first BLOOM trial between Singapore and Malaysia or Thailand (Regulatory Wire).