The Wall Street giant is the latest big bank to depart R3's working group.

JP Morgan has reportedly fled a prominent blockchain consortium spearheded by New York-based start-up R3, as it becomes the latest big bank to abandon the project amid its turbulent fundraising process.

R3, which counts around 80 fee-paying financial institutions as members of its consortium, is seeking to raise $150 million in exchange for a 60 per cent stake in the business.

“JP Morgan parted ways with R3 to pursue a very distinct technology path which is at odds with the one chosen by the global financial services industry, represented by our 80-plus members,” Charley Cooper, a managing director at R3, said, according to media reports. 

Wealth Briefing Asia has contacted JP Morgan for comment and will update coverage accordingly. 

The bank's move to exit the working group followed the departure of a wave of other banking behemoths at the end of last year, which included Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Santander and National Australia Bank. All four of the latter firms withdrew in quick succession. 

JP Morgan is involved in other blockchain initiatives, however.

The bank is working alongside the like of Credit Suisse, BNY Mellon and UBS and more than two dozen other companies on the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance in the latest push to make use of the nascent technology. 

Blockchain technology, a virtual distributed ledger of transactions shared peer-to-peer, can record ownership across a public network of computers rendered tamper-proof by advanced cryptography. It is already known as the platform for the controversial digital currency bitcoin, even though it is only one of several hundred applications that use blockchain technology. 

The technology is causing a stir within the financial services sector as its supporters believe it could reduce hidden expenses in the financial system by ousting inefficiencies across areas such as payments, syndicated loans and equity clearing. 

Ethereum, founded in 2013 by cryptocurrency researcher Vitalik Buterin, is a blockchain-based software platform that allows developers to build decentralised applications. While the bitcoin blockchain is used to track ownership of digital currency, the Ethereum blockchain focuses on running the programing codes of decentralised applications.

The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance will work to enhance the privacy, security and scalability of the Ethereum blockchain with the goal of making it better suited to business applications, according to media reports, which cite the founding companies as sources.

Members of the 30-strong syndicate also include Accenture, BP, Thomson Reuters, Microsoft and Intel.