The Bank of England (BoE) had estimated in March that the regulation of cryptocurrencies should be increased to prevent the growth of that sector from becoming a systemic risk.
The growing demand for digital assets and instant payments has produced an ecosystem of cryptocurrency creators and many middlemen.
Around bitcoin, the most famous of the cryptocurrencies, the size of the cryptoactive market “is now larger than the risky mortgage loan market was” when the global financial crisis (2008) was triggered, with a value of 1.3 billions of dollars,” Panetta stressed.
These assets “engender instability and insecurity,” said the Italian banker.
That is why “we must ensure that (those assets) are subject to standards in accordance with those applied to the financial system,” says Panetta. For that, regulators on the planet must “move faster” to ensure that crypto-assets “do not trigger an anarchic risk frenzy”, synonymous with “bubble”.
