J.P. Morgan: Blockchain Is 3 to 5 Years Away from Its Meaningful Impact

By Kapil Gauhar

Global Banking giant, J.P. Morgan has recently made an array of comments on the future of blockchain technology and other innovations.

In a recent interview, J.P. Morgan’s chair of global research, Joyce Change stated that blockchain technology is 3 to 5 years away from displaying a true impact. The Wall Street researcher also suggested that the headmost technology will likely revolve around trade finance, instead of all industries as some of blockchain’s crusaders expect.

Chang also assured that blockchain in and of itself won’t remodel the current state of global finance. In a somewhat harrowing comment, she said –

“Blockchain isn’t going to reinvent the global payments system, but it will provide marginal improvements.”

In a recent report conducted by analysts at the New York-headquartered financial powerhouse, it was explained that the reason why ledger solutions will become more prevalent around trade finance is that the digitization of sector will enhance the efficiency to a greater extent.

As per the financial outlet’s report on the matter, a former managing director at Merrill Lynch, Change went on to recommend that though cryptocurrencies have taken center-stage in the form of use-case scenarios for blockchain, she believes that it is the underlying technology used for verifying and recording transactions that matter.

She went on exclaiming,

“We need to separate out blockchain from cryptocurrencies.”

Backing her somewhat inflammatory quip, she remarked –

“There’s been progress made on blockchain [technology], there are successful use cases.”

Joyce Change also spoke on the Ethereum-based initiative that was devised by J.P. Morgan and Quorum, Interbank Information Network), aiming to solve issues which are connected with interbank information sharing, while also bolstering the overall speed of transactions. This newly-formed network is currently supporting 157 banks worldwide.

Distributed ledger technology has been doing really well throughout the banking industry, with several entities taking up to the opportunity to use the inceptive technology for improving their underlying operations.