According to the Wall Street bank, the metaverse represents a market opportunity of a trillion dollars in annual revenue.
JP Morgan Chase debuted in the metaverse on Tuesday with the launch of a salon in the virtual world Decentraland, a project based on the Ethereum Blockchain. The announcement came with the publication of a study in which the US investment bank analyzes the potential of metaverses and web3, as well as explaining the causes of its “exploding interest”.
The hall is named after Onyx, just like the Blockchain-based payment platform created by JP Morgan in 2020. The firm, positioned as the largest worldwide bank in the United States, intends to offer a set of financial services virtually within the metaverse.
According to the Wall Street bank, the metaverse has a $1 trillion market opportunity in annual revenue as creators take advantage of Web3 to monetize their work in new ways.
JP Morgan director: “I don’t call them cryptocurrencies, I call them ‘сriptotokens’.”
Jamie Dimon, CEO of US bank JPMorgan Chase, says he no longer uses the word “cryptocurrency,” because “the currencies have rules of law behind them, central banks and tax authorities,” Dimon said in an interview with Ekathimerini published this week.
The general director of JPMorgan pointed out that “people should be careful”, while calling for “greater control by the States” in regard to this type of asset, since – he recalls – “in the last two months [cryptocurrencies] have lost half their value in the US market.”
Asked if JPMorgan has its own cryptocurrency, Dimon replied that it is necessary to “separate dollar-backed [assets].” “We have a JPMorgan coin, with which you can get cash from us or someone else. It represents the dollar in our bank,” he explained.
The director of JP Morgan further asserted that, “We are not here to suggest that the metaverse as we know it today will take over all human interactions, but rather to explore the many exciting opportunities it presents for both consumers and brands.” He added that, “when one thinks of the metaverse economy, or metagenomics, there are opportunities in almost every area of the market.”
It is worth mentioning that JP Morgan has been working on building an interbank information and wholesale payments network based on a permissioned Blockchain since 2018. The firm even created its own token, JPM Coin, in early 2019. Now, with the foray into the metaverse, JP Morgan hopes that the skills acquired in this process will be useful to the users.
Why did JP Morgan enter the metaverse?
JP Morgan head of cryptocurrency and metaverse Christine Moy said in an interview that metaverses are a reality today, so the next step is to build “technology, business infrastructure, privacy/identity, and manpower, to maximize all the potential of our lives in the metaverse.” However, the firm also finds that metaverses offer multiple business opportunities.
In the report that accompanied the launch of its virtual lounge at Decentraland, JP Morgan estimates it likely “that the metaverse will infiltrate all sectors in some way in the coming years”, with a market opportunity that it calculates at more than USD 1 trillion year.
According to the firm’s analysts, the metaverse offers a range of business possibilities, social exchange, monetizing creations, and property, through non-fungible tokens (NFT) as well as strategic alliances.
“We see companies of all shapes and sizes entering the metaverse in different ways, including household names like Walmart, Nike, Gap, Verizon, Hulu, PWC, Adidas, Atari, and others,” the report notes.
Additionally, the firm points out that the metaverse offers the opportunity to earn money for service providers since they will have to “develop and build the products and services that are consumed in the virtual world,” marketing and advertising among them. According to their calculations, ad spending in the metaverse may reach $18.41 billion by 2027.
Other international banks such as Santander and BBV have also recently entered the metaverse. CriptoNoticias reported that a Spanish real estate company named Metrovacesa, of which both banks are the main shareholders would focus on home marketing through the Decentraland metaverse.
By Audy Castaneda
