Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been an unnecessary distraction for investors and the industry is rife with scams, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said Thursday. “I think all that’s been a waste of time… Bitcoin itself has been a hyped-up fraud, a pet rock,” Dimon said on CNBC’s ” Squawk Box .” The crypto industry appeared to be making inroads into Wall Street before 2022, before a dramatic decline in market prices and the blow-up of several high profile firms dampened investor appetite and raised more questions about the safety of the digital assets. For his part, Dimon said that he was unsurprised by the collapse of crypto exchange FTX late last year. “I’m not surprised at all. I called it a decentralized ponzi scheme. The hype around this thing has been extraordinary,” Dimon said, pointing to FTX and controversies surrounding other crypto firms like Tether. “It’s outrageous. The regulators should have stopped this a long time ago,” he added. Dimon has been a longtime skeptic of cryptocurrencies, though his bank uses blockchain technology internally. He said that the technology itself has a future even if the tradable coins do not. “Blockchain is a technology ledger system that we use to move information. We’ve used it do overnight repo, intraday repo. We use it to move money. … That is a technology ledger that we think will be deployable,” Dimon said. The bank CEO’s comments came at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Bitcoin was trading at 20,734 on Thursday morning. The cryptocurrency has rebounded about 25% so far this year but is still more than 60% below its all-time highs.
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