UK Treasury Launches Inquiry Into Crypto’s Effect On Investors And Businesses.
The United Kingdom’s Treasury Select Committee, a group of cross-party MPs, is launching an inquiry into digital currencies like bitcoin and blockchain innovation with an end goal to comprehend them.
The UK Treasury Committee is today opening another inquiry into digital currencies to center around the two opportunities and dangers postured to customers, organizations and the government. The group of legislators, depicted by The Guardian as ‘a powerful committee of MPs’, will likewise examine the unsettling potential of blockchain innovation on the financial industry, including banks and the central bank.
Treasury committee chair Nicky Morgan said the inquiry was required when regular investors and citizens are progressively getting to be aware of digital currencies like bitcoin. Individual investors aren’t given any consumer protection with crypto-related investments, she stated, indicating an absence of regulation in the space.
“The Treasury Committee will look at the potential risks that digital currencies could generate for consumers, businesses, and Governments, including those relating to volatility, money laundering and cyber-crime,” she expressed.
Notably, she included:
“We will also examine the potential benefits of cryptocurrencies and the technology underpinning them, how they can create innovative opportunities, and to what extent they could disrupt the economy and replace traditional means of payment.”
The committee chair said it is “crucial” to strike the correct balance between regulation concentrated on protecting consumers and organizations “whilst not stifling innovation”. The new inquiry, she included, will explore how this balance would be accomplished.
The committee will open itself to verbal and written guidance and recommendations from specialists on digital currency before submitting a report to the government with its suggested way to ‘striking the right balance.’
The inquiry comes quite close to the UK Treasury weighing up more extensive regulation and taxation policies for digital currency trades and users separately.
As per committee member Alison McGovern, the present inquiry will help stir UK bureaucrats and politicians to instruct themselves on digital currency before implementing any policies.
She stated:
“It is time that Whitehall and Westminster understood cryptocurrency better, and thought more clearly about the policy environment for blockchain technology.”
