JPMorgan: “The Real Threat to Bitcoin Isn’t the Sales Made by Strategy”

JPMorgan analysts stated that despite the recent risk perception in the cryptocurrency market centered around Strategy’s potential Bitcoin sale, the real structural threat to Bitcoin is deeper than that.

According to analysts, the main risk is that tokenization, payments, and exchange processes will increasingly take place on permissioned and regulated infrastructures rather than public blockchains. The JPMorgan team stated that if this trend continues, the crypto ecosystem could face a “structural loss of value,” leading to a slowdown in transaction activity, decreased liquidity, and a decline in capital inflows.

Analysts stated in their assessment, “In our view, the more significant risk stems from the continued adoption of blockchain in traditional finance, bypassing public and permissionless networks.”

According to JPMorgan, corporate adoption has so far clearly favored permissioned blockchains. Factors such as privacy, KYC/AML controls, governance, transaction capacity, legal accountability, and regulatory clarity are key factors in this preference. Analysts emphasize that this poses a competitive threat to public blockchains like Ethereum.

The report also noted that the increasing prevalence of tokenized deposits, which are preferred by regulators due to their non-transferable structure, could weaken demand for stablecoins in corporate payment and clearing transactions. It further stated that SWIFT’s blockchain initiative and central bank digital currency projects like the digital euro and digital yuan have strengthened regulated alternatives.

JPMorgan analysts noted that Ethereum already holds a share of the approximately $50 billion real-world asset tokenization market. However, they stated that this reflects early trials rather than a long-term market structure, and that as institutional adoption increases, processes such as issuance, custody, exchange, and lifecycle management may shift to private or permissioned infrastructures that meet authentication, privacy, and operational resilience requirements.

In this scenario, the role of public blockchains is considered to be largely limited to distribution and restricted secondary market transactions. According to JPMorgan, such a transformation could become a long-term pressure point not only for Ethereum and similar networks, but also for the broader crypto market and, indirectly, for Bitcoin.

*This is not investment advice.