Financial technology middlemen reportedly sent investment banking giant JPMorgan Chase 1.89 billion data requests in the month of June.

In an internal company memo reviewed by CNBC, a JPMorgan systems employee noted that only 13% of those requests were initiated by a customer for transactions.

“Aggregators are accessing customer data multiple times daily, even when the customer is not actively using the app. These access requests are massively taxing our systems.”

An anonymous source with knowledge of the memo tells CNBC that the requests often involve helping fintech companies bolster their products or stop fraud.

Earlier this month, JPMorgan informed fintech companies such as PayPal, Venmo and Coinbase that they will need to begin paying to access their customers’ bank account information, a move that sparked controversy in the digital asset sector.

Gemini co-founder Tyler Winklevoss claims the investment bank is attempting to sabotage fintech and crypto firms, accusing JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon of trying to wreck President Donald Trump’s attempts to embrace digital assets.

“This will bankrupt fintechs that help you link your bank accounts to crypto companies like Gemini, Coinbase, and Kraken so you can easily fund your account with fiat to buy Bitcoin and crypto…

Jamie Dimon and his cronies are trying to undercut President Trump’s mandate to make America the pro-innovation and the crypto capital of the world. We must fight back!”

Dimon, however, defended the fee proposal during the bank’s second-quarter earnings call.

“So, this is very important. So forget pricing for a second, we are in favor of the customer, but we think the customer has the right to if they want to share their information. What we ask people to do is, what do they – do they actually know what’s being shared? What is actually being shared? It shouldn’t be everything. It should be what their customer wants. It should have a time limit because some of these things went on for years. It should not be re-marketed or resold to third parties. And so, we’re kind of in favor of all that, done properly.

And then the payment, it just costs a lot of money to set up the APIs (application programming interfaces) and stuff like that to run the system’s protection. So, we just think it should be done and done right. And that’s the main part. It’s not like you can’t do it.”

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Generated Image: Midjourney

Ye Zhang, the co-founder of Ethereum layer-2 network Scroll, has pushed back against calls for Ethereum to impose fees on layer-2 networks.

Zhang argued in a detailed social media post on April 2, that the proposal was harmful to Ethereum’s long-term vision. He called it a “toxic” approach that prioritizes short-term revenue over lasting ecosystem value.

According to Zhang, Ethereum’s strength lies not in extracting fees from rollups but in positioning ETH as the central asset across multiple Layer-2 (L2) ecosystems. He argued that taxing these networks mirrors corporate behavior and runs counter to the principles of decentralization that Ethereum stands for.

He emphasized that Ethereum’s value should not be measured by protocol income. Instead, the network should be considered an economic foundation for a growing rollup-centric ecosystem.

He noted:

“ETH’s real strength isn’t in protocol fees — it’s in becoming the hub asset across thousands of rollup ecosystems. That’s the future.”

Zhang explained that ETH’s advantage is its presence across major L2 platforms like Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync, and Scroll. Even on networks like StarkNet, that don’t use ETH for gas, he noted that the digital asset remains a key trading pair on decentralized exchanges.

Ethereum’s future

Considering this, Zhang outlined two possible directions for Ethereum. In one scenario, ETH evolves into a trusted store of value and a central hub for rollup activity.

According to Zhang:

“Every aligned L2 expands Ethereum’s surface area and social consensus. A thousand scalable rollups with ETH as the center > any monolithic chain.”

On the other hand, Ethereum could become focused on taxing L2 activity, which could drive them toward alternative data availability layers and reduce ETH’s influence in the broader blockchain landscape.

To avoid this, Zhang urged the community to focus on scaling execution and improving data availability infrastructure.

He called for a 1000x improvement in blob capacity and encouraged building out shared tools like cross-rollup liquidity bridges and interoperability solutions.

Zhang concluded:

“ETH wins by being the gravity, not the toll booth.”

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