Shocking! UK has botched Cryptocurrency space?
The UK has less than 12 months to regain its footing on cryptocurrency or face a loss of talent and even its status as a global financial-services leader, the country’s former Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond warned.
It’s “frankly quite shocking” that Britain has fallen behind other finance hubs such as the European Union in setting clear regulation on the burgeoning crypto industry, Hammond said in an interview. “This is not the natural order of things,” said the former politician, who stepped down in 2019 and is now a senior adviser to London-based institutional crypto exchange Copper.co.
The Financial Conduct Authority issued a proposal to restrict cryptoasset marketing to experienced investors this month, a day after the U.K. Treasury said it planned to tighten rules on crypto advertising. Other rules remain at the planning stages and a program to register crypto companies has faced delays.
“It’s credible that 2022 is available as a catch-up period,” Hammond said. But if the U.K. appears “manifestly behind the curve” next year, digital-asset businesses are considering relocating their headquarters to jurisdictions which are further ahead with regulation, such as Switzerland, Monaco and Germany, he added.
Regulators around the world are grappling with the boom in volatile cryptocurrencies, whose dramatic price swings have brought in millions of retail traders, along with institutions trying to harness the underlying blockchain technology to improve how they handle trades. While some crypto boosters see regulation as a threat to the decentralized nature of the asset class, others hope adding protection for users will lead to mainstream adoption.
For Hammond, the U.K. needs to regulate if it stands a chance of
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