JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has called for the proper regulation of crypto to protect investors. Dimon has a long history of scepticism about digital assets. Once, he called crypto assets “pet rocks”.

Recently, at the 41st J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, Dimon referred to cryptocurrencies as speculative assets that can never replace real money. He added that virtual assets allow for a wide range of illegal activities, to which many people in the U.S. fell victim.

“A lot of people got hurt, you know, and these were retirees, grandmothers, you know, lower-income people. It was a shame,” he said. “And it should have been immediately putting some kind of regulatory framework so that there’s some investor protection.”

Crypto ‘decentralized Ponzi scheme’

Since 2017, Dimon has been vocal about his scepticism of crypto assets, often describing them as “fraud”, “worthless”, “a complete sideshow”, and “pet rocks”.

Dimon is no longer as vocal in his attacks against digital assets. However, he is still one of the most prominent voices against Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. He still sees digital currencies as dangerous speculation tools that do not have real value.

In an interview back in October 2021, Dimon said he had stopped calling them cryptocurrencies because they are not “real currencies”.

“Currencies have rules of law behind them, central banks and tax authorities,” he said. “I call them crypto-tokens.”

However, he recently stressed that his strong opposition to cryptocurrencies differs from his view on blockchain technology. While he approves of transactions made on blockchains, he described digital tokens as a “decentralized Ponzi scheme.”

“I called it a decentralized Ponzi scheme because people just hyped it – hyped and hyped it,” he said.

“They’re going to write tons of books about it, about the money that was stolen from it, what people knew and didn’t know.”