Change lies ahead for haphazard crypto regulation

The World Wide Web, as its name implies, is borderless, and so is crypto. The internet and cryptocurrency’s common ethos is wide-open communication and exchange, unimpeded by national boundaries. On the ground, however, as crypto has become a more significant player in the financial system, nations have begun to consider issues of sovereignty and regulation. While many countries have so far remained open to crypto, others have restricted its use or outright banned it. The same reason that some have advocated for crypto and blockchain technology — as a means of revolutionizing the international financial system — has alarmed plenty of world leaders.

For example, Hillary Clinton, calling attention to the risks of crypto and the need for regulation, said at a Bloomberg conference in Singapore in 2021, “One more area that I hope nation-states start paying greater attention to is the rise of cryptocurrency because [it] has the potential for undermining currencies, for undermining the role of the dollar as the reserve currency, for destabilizing nations, perhaps starting with small ones but going much larger.” These are strong words, and governments have begun to take claims like these seriously. Despite crypto’s decentralization, regulation appears inevitable and could profoundly alter its development and adoption worldwide.

The regulatory environment

In general, financial regulations supervise the world of finance, setting up restrictions, requirements, and guidelines for its institutions, with the goal of keeping financial systems stable and establishing and maintaining their integrity. For traditional financial institutions across the world, these rules have been evolving for decades. The cryptocurrency market, as a comparably new area of finance, does not have this larger history, and given its rapid growth and maturity, it now faces the prospect of regulation.

As the crypto market has grown, governments and international organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund, have taken notice of its potential to disrupt the established economic systems — in both the forward-looking, tech-world sense of the word and the more troublesome sense of creating problems, such as those associated with the collapse of the crypto exchange FTX in November 2022. In other words, the cryptocurrency industry is now extensive enough that financial analysts worry that it may have adverse macroeconomic consequences if not properly regulated, even if it also…