Days after JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon labeled Bitcoin a “fraud” and threatened to fire any employees caught trading cryptocurrency, it has emerged JPMorgan Securities made a number of trades on the Swedish stock exchange. Someone at the company bought and sold an instrument called Bitcoin XBT that tracks the bitcoin price.
The trades were published on Sweden’s Nordbank website, detailing the “Bitcoin Tracker One” product, which is the first bitcoin tracking product to operate on a regulated exchange. The instrument is provided by XBT Provider AB.
Nordbank’s data shows that JPMorgan holds over 9,000 XBT shares. XBT Provider says all share certificates are backed by real bitcoin holdings.
This disclosure has caused some fuss in the Bitcoin community, especially after the timing of Dimon’s recent statements — coming in the middle of regulatory uncertainty in China — and the ensuing price decline.
This shows that JPMorgan Securities purchased shares in the tracker from a broker.
Keiser Report host and cryptocurrency investor Max Keiser also provocatively tweeted:
The fact that JPMorgan has purchased shares in a regulated bitcoin tracking product highlights the hypocrisy of both Dimon and banking industry. While Dimon labeled Bitcoin a “scam” and a “fraud”, his company is quite happy to profit from the dip in prices that Dimon’s statement helped create.
When we look at Dimon’s historic statements concerning Bitcoin, they seem to be almost the ultimate contra-indicator — or at least a projection of what his firm has actually been fined for doing. JPMorgan has paid out over $26 billion USD in fines for bribery, fraud, perjury, and conning homeowners, amongst other indiscretions.
