Market Analysis Report (30 Aug 2022)

JPMorgan’s Umar Farooq, who heads the digital assets unit Onyx at the firm, has suggested that most of the currently available digital assets are “junk” and that the real use case of crypto is yet to surface.

Farooq voiced his opinion during a panel discussion at the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Green Shoots Seminar on Tuesday, during which he stated that regulation is yet to catch up to the innovative industry, something that is holding many traditional institutions back. 

During the seminar, he also voiced his opinion that the utlity surrounding the vast majority of digital assets is lacking: “Most of crypto is still junk actually, I mean with the exception of I would say, a few dozen tokens, everything else that has been mentioned is either noise or frankly, is just gonna go away.”

“So in my mind, the use cases haven’t arisen fully, and the regulation hasn’t caught up and I think that’s why you see the financial industry, in general, being a little bit slow in catching up,” added Farooq, who serves as CEO of JPMorgan’s blockchain unit Onyx Digital Assets (ODA).

Instead, Farooq suggested that investing in digital assets in their current form is primarily for speculative purposes: “You need all of those things to mature so that you can actually do things with them. Right now, we’re just not there yet, most of the money that’s being used in Web3 today, in the current infrastructure, is for speculative investment.”

JPMorgan has been adopting a more crypto-friendly narrative over the past few years as they look toward blockchain technology and how it can be used to improve the traditional finance ecosystem.