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FEMALE VOICE:  This podcast has been prepared exclusively for institutional, wholesale, professional clients, and qualified investors, only as defined by local laws and regulations.  Please read other important information, which can be found on the link at the end of the podcast episode.

MR. MICHAEL CEMBALEST:  Hello, everybody.  This is Michael Cembalest with the Eye on the Market podcast for February 2002.  For those of you that have been reading the Eye on the Market for a while, you’ll recognize that there’s one topic that I haven’t said a single word about, which is cryptocurrencies and the blockchain.  And I’ve been debating whether or not I wanted to dive into this, but I just decided that there was too much going on to continue sidestepping it, even though banks like ours have a lot of restrictions in terms of what kinds of things that we can even execute with customers on this topic.  But I thought it was important to take a look, and so I have published a piece called The Maltese Falcoin, which goes into a lot of the crypto and blockchain issues at hand.

So this is not going to be a long podcast.  I’m not going to dive into the details here.  We look at venture capital flows into the crypto and blockchain space, adoption trends by institutional and high net worth investors of cryptocurrency, and then we get into three or actually five specific use cases, sorry, Bitcoin in the store of value, crypto use in cross-border remittances, crypto used in decentralized finance, non-fungible tokens in the art world, and then a discussion about financial services’ adoption of the blockchain itself in permission to private blockchains.

My take on this is obviously less optimistic than a lot of the people that inhabit the crypto and blockchain world fulltime, as you can tell from the title of the piece.  So I circulated it to a number of them for rebuttals, and I include a section here called Rebuttals to this paper, where you can see some of the visions that are a lot bolder than mine in terms of what the future holds with respect to cryptocurrency and blockchain applications.  And then I’ve got some conclusions in a really nice picture of Humphrey Bogart.  So that’s really all I feel like sharing today.  Take a look at the piece, and I hope you enjoy it, and I’ll talk to you next time.

FEMALE VOICE:  Michael Cembalest’s Eye on the Market offers a unique perspective on the economy, current events, markets, and investment portfolios, and is a production of J.P. Morgan Asset and Wealth Management.  Michael Cembalest is the Chairman of Market and Investment Strategy for J.P. Morgan Asset Management and is one of our most renowned and provocative speakers.  For more information, please subscribe to the Eye on the Market by contacting your J.P. Morgan representative.  If you’d like to hear more, please explore episodes on iTunes or on our website.

This podcast is intended for informational purposes only and is a communication on behalf of J.P. Morgan Institutional Investments Incorporated.  Views may not be suitable for all investors and are not intended as personal investment advice or a solicitation or recommendation.  Outlooks and past performance are never guarantees of future results.  This is not investment research.

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