Today in crypto: Bitcoin community’s backlash against JP Morgan grows with calls to boycott, Bloomberg’s Eric Balchunas says Zcash could dilute political and cultural support for Bitcoin, BlackRock’s clients aren’t factoring Bitcoin’s global payments potential into their investment thesis.
Bitcoin community’s backlash against JP Morgan grows with calls to boycott
The Bitcoin (BTC) community and supporters of Strategy, the world’s biggest BTC treasury company, called for a boycott of JP Morgan, a financial services giant, on Sunday.
The backlash followed news that the MSCI, an index company behind many major stock market benchmarks, may exclude crypto treasury companies from its indexes in January 2026.
“I just pulled $20 million from Chase and suing them for credit card malfeasance,” real estate investor and Bitcoin advocate Grant Cardone said in support of the boycott.
“They hate Bitcoin, decentralized finance, and stablecoins. They quietly architected Chokepoint 1.0 and 2.0. Now, they see Bitcoin as vulnerable, and they are putting the screws on Strategy,” investor Fred Krueger said about JP Morgan.
The exclusion of crypto treasury companies from stock market indexes could trigger a sell-off of these companies, forcing them to dump their crypto assets onto the market, which would negatively impact crypto prices.
Zcash risks ‘splitting the vote’ against Bitcoin, Bloomberg ETF analyst warns
Bloomberg Senior ETF Analyst Eric Balchunas has warned that Zcash may adversely impact Bitcoin at this crucial moment.
In a recent post on X, Balchunas said Zcash (ZEC) has “third-party candidate vibes, like Gary Johnson or Jill Stein,” arguing that pushing a separate privacy coin risks “splitting the vote” when Bitcoin (BTC) needs unified political and cultural support.
Balchunas’s comment comes as the Bitcoin vs Zcash debate intensifies. Arman Meguerian, founder and CEO of Timestamp, dismissed the idea that BTC supporters are pivoting to Zcash. “I don’t know a single Bitcoin maxi that thinks about Zcash at all,” he wrote on X.
Jan3 founder Samson Mow echoed the sentiment, claiming that Bitcoin maxis are “only looking at Zcash to roll our eyes at it.”
BlackRock’s Bitcoin clients aren’t ‘underwriting’ the case for global payments
BlackRock’s head of digital assets, Robbie Mitchnick, said that most of the world’s largest asset managers’ clients aren’t considering Bitcoin’s use for daily payments when deciding whether to invest in the asset.
“I think for us, and most of our clients today, they’re not really underwriting to that global payment network case,” Mitchnick said during a podcast interview published to YouTube on Friday.
“That’s sort of maybe out-of-the-money-option-value upside,” Mitchnick said.
He said this doesn’t mean Bitcoin won’t eventually achieve widespread use in payments, but he called that scenario “a little bit more speculative,” stressing that investors are far more focused on the “digital gold” or store-of-value thesis.
“There’s a lot that needs to happen in terms of Bitcoin scaling, Lightning, and otherwise to make that possible,” he said. In August 2024, Galaxy Research suggested that most Bitcoin layer-2 scaling networks, particularly “rollups” may not be sustainable in the long term despite their popularity as a promising method to keep Bitcoin payments cheap, fast, and decentralized.