Ministers have announced the government’s first substantial crypto regulation plans as the Treasury last week published an 82-page consultation.
But despite widely drawn potential reforms, actual future regulation will be slow: responses followed by legislative drafting will take several years.
And until now, UK regulation around crypto assets has been painfully slow and behind other jurisdictions. Political pressure to make progress increased after the dramatic demise of FTX, the world’s second largest cryptocurrency exchange, which filed for bankruptcy last November with $9 billion (£7.46 billion) in liabilities.
The digital asset sector is constantly innovating, with new forms of asset regularly emerging
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The FTX debacle is reported to have affected about 80,000 UK investors. Unprotected by current British regulation, these investors do not benefit from the financial services compensation scheme that applies to fiat currency assets, protecting up to