In 2017, Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin a fraud and said he would fire any JPMorgan trader caught buying it.
In 2024, JPMorgan filed with the SEC showing it held positions in multiple Bitcoin ETFs on behalf of clients.
Nobody at JPMorgan issued a correction. Nobody apologized. Nobody explained what changed. They just started buying — quietly, through filings, through fund allocations, through the kind of paperwork that does not make headlines. If you were not paying attention, you missed it entirely. That is exactly how they wanted it.
This is not a story about hypocrisy. Hypocrisy implies they were being honest the first time. They were not. This is a story about what banks actually do when an asset becomes impossible to kill.
What They Said
The record is worth reading in full because it was not casual skepticism. It was deliberate.
Jamie Dimon — 2017: fraud. Would fire any trader touching it. Called it worse than tulip bulbs.
Warren Buffett — 2018: rat poison squared. No intrinsic value. Would not own it for any price.
Charlie Munger — 2018: trading in fresh turds. A comment so vivid it got quoted in financial newspapers without irony.
Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs — 2018: not comfortable with it as a currency. Expressed skepticism it would survive regulatory pressure.
Ray Dalio — multiple years: acknowledged Bitcoin’s innovation but doubted governments would allow a competing monetary system to exist at scale.
These were not random commentators. These were the five or six most powerful capital allocators on the planet, speaking with the full weight of their institutions behind them. When men like this speak, pension funds listen. Advisors listen. Retail investors listen. The message was clear and coordinated: stay away.
Bitcoin did not stay away.
What Actually Changed
Three things happened that made the original position indefensible.
Bitcoin did not die.
Every major institution had an implicit thesis: Bitcoin would either be regulated out of existence or collapse under its own speculative weight. It was declared dead more than 400 times by mainstream media. It crashed 80% in 2018 after the ICO bubble. It crashed 50% in a single day in March 2020 when COVID hit. It crashed 75% in 2022 after the FTX collapse took out an entire ecosystem of leveraged speculation.
Each time, the same people said: this is it. This is the end. This time it will not recover.
Each time, it recovered. And each time it recovered, it recovered higher than before. After fifteen years of being wrong about Bitcoin going to zero, the thesis became impossible to hold publicly. Survival, repeated often enough, becomes legitimacy. Bitcoin earned its legitimacy the hard way — by refusing to disappear.
Their clients started demanding it.
Banks do not lead markets. They follow money. When MicroStrategy put $425 million on its balance sheet in Bitcoin in 2020, CFOs across corporate America started asking questions. When Tesla, Square, and Marathon Digital followed, those questions became boardroom conversations. When high-net-worth individuals started asking their private wealth managers for Bitcoin exposure and the managers said no, some of those clients found managers who said yes.
Banks are not sentimental. When clients walk, banks follow them out the door and ask what it would take to bring them back. Bitcoin became the answer to that question more and more often between 2020 and 2023. By the time the ETF came, the demand was already there. The ETF just made it impossible to ignore.
The ETF settled the argument.
The approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs in the United States in January 2024 was the moment the last institutional excuse disappeared. Banks had spent years saying Bitcoin was too risky, too unregulated, too difficult to custody safely. The ETF eliminated every one of those objections in a single regulatory decision.
BlackRock’s IBIT became one of the fastest-growing ETFs in the history of financial markets. Fidelity followed. Invesco followed. Within months, the same banks that had called Bitcoin a fraud were distributing Bitcoin ETFs to the clients they had warned away from Bitcoin years before. The regulatory wrapper made it acceptable. The client demand made it profitable. And once BlackRock — the $10 trillion asset manager, the firm that runs money for sovereign wealth funds and pension systems — launched a Bitcoin product, the debate was over. You cannot call something a fraud when the world’s largest asset manager is selling it as a legitimate investment vehicle.
What They Are Actually Doing Now
The shift has been systematic. Here is what major institutions are actually doing with Bitcoin in 2026, not what they said about it in 2017.
JPMorgan holds Bitcoin ETF positions for clients. Its blockchain division processes institutional crypto transactions. Dimon still expresses personal skepticism in interviews. His bank’s filings tell a different story.
Goldman Sachs operates a digital assets trading desk. It holds Bitcoin ETF exposure on behalf of institutional clients. It has invested in blockchain infrastructure companies. The trading desk that was not allowed to exist in 2018 now has a headcount and a P&L.
Morgan Stanley offered Bitcoin funds to its high-net-worth clients in 2021 — earlier than most of its peers. It has been expanding those offerings since.
Citi is building infrastructure to make Bitcoin accessible to institutional clients at scale. Not because someone at Citi became a Bitcoin believer. Because the demand from serious institutional money is real and the bank cannot afford to leave that revenue on the table.
BlackRock runs the largest Bitcoin ETF on earth. Its CEO Larry Fink called Bitcoin rat poison adjacent for years. He now calls it digital gold and a legitimate store of value in investor communications. He did not change his philosophy. He changed his revenue model.
Emirates NBD — the UAE’s second-largest bank managing $272 billion in assets — publicly called Bitcoin digital gold earlier this year and began building portfolio allocations. This is a bank in a region where sovereign wealth funds hold some of the most sophisticated capital in the world. They are not making this move because of a tweet. They are making it because the analysis supports it.
The Part Nobody Says Out Loud
Bitcoin was designed specifically to make banks irrelevant.
The genesis block — the very first block ever mined on January 3, 2009 — contained a message that Satoshi Nakamoto embedded deliberately. A newspaper headline: “Chancellor on Brink of Second Bailout for Banks.” It was not decoration. It was a mission statement. Bitcoin was built in direct response to a financial system that had just destroyed itself through reckless leverage and required a $700 billion public bailout to survive.
The original vision was peer-to-peer money. No banks in the middle. No custodians taking fees. No institution capable of closing your account, freezing your assets, or turning off access to your own money.
And now the same banks that Bitcoin was designed to replace are its primary distribution channel.
There are two ways to read this. One is that Bitcoin lost. The banks captured it, wrapped it in ETF structures, slapped a management fee on it, and neutered its original purpose. The other reading is that Bitcoin won so completely that the most powerful financial institutions on earth had no choice but to adopt it or become irrelevant to the next generation of investors.
Both readings contain truth. Neither one changes the underlying mechanics. The 21 million coin limit does not care which reading you prefer. It enforces itself regardless of who is holding the coins.
What This Means for Price
This part is simple arithmetic.
Banks manage tens of trillions in client assets globally. A 1% allocation to Bitcoin across the institutional wealth management industry represents hundreds of billions in new demand. Bitcoin has a hard supply cap of 21 million coins. Roughly 19.8 million have already been mined. A significant portion of those are lost forever in wallets whose keys no longer exist.
When demand increases against a fixed and shrinking supply, price goes up. This is not a prediction. It is how markets work.
The second effect is longer-term. Institutional investors hold assets for years, not days. As more Bitcoin moves into long-term institutional custody — ETF structures, corporate treasuries, sovereign reserves — the available liquid supply shrinks further. The US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve alone has taken a meaningful position off the market permanently. When liquidity shrinks and demand grows, volatility eventually decreases and price trends upward.
The buyer profile of Bitcoin has changed fundamentally. The early cycles were driven by retail speculation, developers, and ideological early adopters. The current cycle is driven by institutions, corporations, and sovereign governments. That shift is irreversible. Once a sovereign wealth fund or pension system allocates to an asset class, it does not de-allocate unless there is a catastrophic failure. Bitcoin has survived every attempt at catastrophic failure.
Citi is now building the infrastructure to make Bitcoin accessible to its institutional clients at scale. That infrastructure does not get built for a speculative bet. It gets built for an asset class that serious money has decided is permanent.
The Honest Conclusion
Banks did not change their minds because they were convinced by Bitcoin’s technology or philosophy. They changed because their clients demanded it, because the regulatory environment made it possible, and because the alternative was watching a generation of wealth move to competitors who were willing to offer what clients were asking for.
The mockery was business strategy dressed up as financial analysis. It was designed to keep retail investors away from an asset that threatened the banking model and did not generate fees for banking institutions.
The buying is the same business strategy operating in the opposite direction. Bitcoin became too big to mock and too demanded to ignore. So they started selling it to the people they had warned away from it.
Bitcoin did not need the banks’ approval to survive. It survived without it for fifteen years. But now that it has their distribution networks, their custodial infrastructure, and their client relationships behind it — the asset that was supposed to be dead has access to more capital than at any point in its history.
The men who called it a fraud are selling it to their wealthiest clients.
That is either the most important financial signal of the decade or it is not. There is no middle position that makes sense.
Published March 3, 2026
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