Today, JP Morgan announced a new Payments Innovation Lab in Greece with plans to hire 50 people in Athens. He will be involved in global research and development, including for JP Morgan’s Onyx, the division responsible for its blockchain innovations.

The new center will help develop solutions using distributed ledger technology (DLT), artificial intelligence and cryptography.

“We want to stay on the cutting edge of payments innovation, and our new location in Athens will be a key hub for our cutting-edge payments innovation work,” said Takis Georgakopoulos, global head of JP Morgan Payments.

He describes Onyx as developing “products, platforms and markets” for the company and its customers.

So what has Onyx been up to so far? There is Onyx Digital Assets with an intraday DLT repository application and one to tokenize collateral. Their Liink solution is for messaging about conventional payments.

And there is JPM Coin, which it refers to as a blockchain deposit account. It was released in the United States and is preparing to release a European version. Some of JPM Coin’s solutions focus on providing value-added services to corporate treasurers, such as programmable money. It is also experimenting with using JPM Coin on a public blockchain as part of Project Guardian, Singapore’s DeFi experiments with the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

A fourth area deals with some of the more cutting-edge aspects, such as digital identity, native digital assets (eg, tokens), renewable energy, and DeFi.

But listening to the group’s recent talks, one gets the distinct impression that what we’ve seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg.

For example, the bank is looking to make NFT payments more user-friendly. Startup Ramp Network just raised a $70 million funding round to do just that. With NFTs set to play a major role in the metaverse, games, sports collectibles, music, art, and more, there’s plenty of room for competition.