In September 2017, the chief executive of America's largest bank stood up at an investor conference and called bitcoin a fraud. Jamie Dimon said it would blow up.
He said he would fire any JPMorgan trader caught trading it because it was against the bank's rules and stupid. On October 19 this year, JPMorgan Asset Management, the investment arm of a bank worth around $900 billion that manages about $5.2 trillion, published its 2027 Long-Term Capital Market Assumptions.
Large investors use it to plan a decade or more ahead. For the first time in its 31 editions, it put Bitcoin in those long-term forecasts.
Base case: about 10% a year over the next 10-15 years, ahead of its forecasts for US stocks, gold and bonds. Bear case: a loss of 9.7% a year.
Nine years, from fraud to forecast. The easy reading is the wrong one.
JPMorgan did not tell anyone to buy bitcoin. Its own analysts still call it speculative.
They put its expected volatility at around 55%, roughly three times that of US large company shares. They kept it out of their main portfolio models because its correlations with other assets are unstable.
A forecast is not a recommendation, and a range that runs from minus 9.7 to plus 17 is an honest admission of uncertainty. So I have watched this change from the inside.
I have been in digital assets since 2016. I was told crypto was a scam, and that being early made me a failure.
The people who said that weren't foolish. In 2016 there was no regulated custody worth the name, no clear law and plenty of fraud.
Their scepticism was reasonable for the world as it was. What changed is not bitcoin.
The code is much the same. What changed is everything built around it.
Rules arrived for who may hold client assets, how they must be segregated, and who is accountable when things go wrong. Banks and specialist custodians now hold digital assets under supervision.
Third, exchange-traded funds. Since US regulators approved spot bitcoin ETFs in January 2024, pension funds and wealth managers can hold exposure through the same accounts they use for shares.
Those funds now hold over $100 billion. Fourth, and least noticed, the plumbing of credit.
That last one matters most. In October 2025, Bloomberg reported that JPMorgan planned to let institutional clients pledge bitcoin and ether (ETH) as collateral for loans, with a third party holding the coins.
This month, Jeonbuk Bank became the first South Korean bank to lend against bitcoin to companies, in won. It does not hold the coins itself.
A registered custodian does, and if a borrower defaults, the court sells the bitcoin under enforcement rules that took effect on October 1. In Switzerland, Sygnum Bank says bitcoin now makes up more than 80% of the collateral pledged for its Lombard loans, up from 63% in 2023.