JP Morgan's New DLT Lead: We're Not Done With Blockchain Innovation

As JP Morgan Chase's new blockchain lead, Christine Moy has big shoes to fill.

Around the same time, Baldet announced her departure, word leaked out that JP Morgan was considering a spin-out of Quorum, the ethereum-based, open-source project that had been the cornerstone of the bank's blockchain work.

To be clear, those deliberations do not mean Quorum is struggling - big corporates like JP Morgan tend to shelve failing projects, not spin them out into funded entities.

In an interview this week, Moy was quick to emphasize that the recent speculation around Quorum does not capture the breadth of JP Morgan's work in distributed ledger technology.

It's true that JP Morgan is involved in a number of important blockchain projects that are separate from Quorum, such as its collaborations with Digital Asset Holdings, Axoni and Nivaura.

Fortunately for JP Morgan, in Moy it has a leader who not only knows that project inside and out but is all too familiar with the reasons the bank started exploring the tech to begin with.

Moy, the new program lead for the Blockchain Centre of Excellence at JP Morgan, brings to the role firsthand knowledge of exactly the kind of problems that distributed ledger technology aims to solve.

"Creating a fragmentation of small blockchain networks, without figuring out a way to enable interoperability or connectivity, is likely not the promised path to the cost savings and operational efficiency that enterprises are looking for."

For her part, Moy said several times that she is "Agnostic," or neutral, about which blockchain or protocols are used.

In the meantime, Moy's focus is on bringing new business applications to Quorum, such as the testing of a debt issuance platform with a host of institutional investors.