On Tuesday (May 17), Sir Jon Cunliffe, Deputy Governor for Financial Stability at the Bank of England (BoE), addressed crypto assets on the Wall Street Journal-hosted three-day event “The Future of Everything”.
He “became Deputy Governor for Financial Stability on 1 November 2013,” according to his BoE bio. He serves on the “Financial Policy and Monetary Policy Committees, the Bank’s Court of Directors, and the Prudential Regulation Committee.”
He is a member of the G20 Financial Stability Board Steering Committee and has “particular responsibility within the Bank for financial stability, supervision and monitoring of financial market infrastructures and payment systems, and worldwide.” He is also the Chair of the Bank for International Settlements’ Payments and Market Infrastructures Committee.
According to a Bloomberg report on Sir Jon’s speech, he said:
“There’s a long tail of retail investors who have invested in crypto assets… Do they all understand what they’ve invested in? I think not. For that long tail of retail investors, I’m not sure they do understand. They don’t really see this as a financial investment.”
He went on to say that there are two types of crypto assets: unbacked crypto assets (such as Bitcoin), which he claims are primarily used for “speculative investment,” and backed crypto assets (aka stablecoins), for which he claims that “regulatory authorities will need to ensure that the standards that apply to current systemic payment systems apply equally effectively to any systemic or likely to be systemic payment system using stablecoins.”
He closed his speech by remarking that “crypto technology provides tremendous possibilities,” but that “it must be a really superior mousetrap, not one that merely functions to lower – or no – standards at all.”
, Sir Jon Cunliffe, Deputy Governor for Financial Stability at the Bank of England (BoE), addressed crypto assets){kind=link}