Bank of England Deputy Governor Jon Cunliffe has said the survivors of this rout in crypto could be leaders of the future — possibly rivaling current giants like Amazon, Bloomberg reported Wednesday (June 22).
Cunliffe said this crash, which has seen over a trillion dollars cut off the value of bitcoin and other digital coins, has been comparable to the dot-com collapse at the beginning of the millennium. He said there had been a lot of companies gone, “but the technology didn’t go away.”
“It came back 10 years later, and those that survived — the Amazons and the eBays — turned out to be the dominant players,” he continued.
In his opinion, crypto tech had a wide variety of opportunities, with “huge applications and potential” for finances, despite its current volatility. Cunliffe added that he thought the form of digital assets would likely continue despite the troubles.
He said there would be potential “huge efficiencies and changes in market structure.”
All of this comes as the BOE is looking into plans for its own retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) and it plans to put out a consultation paper this year. The report noted that one of the big issues with the CBDC is whether or not to put out an on- or off-ramp to fiat, or simply something flexible enough for private stablecoins.
The BOE also said recently that several big lenders in the country have to do more to show they could fail without it all being a liability for customers and taxpayers.
Read more: BOE: UK Banks Need to Show They Can Fail ‘Safely’
This comes as the BOE was doing an assessment — its first — on whether HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group and Standard Chartered had been prepared properly to manage their possible collapse, if that ever happened.
The BOE said all three of them had to fix their issues, so that they could possibly fail and still remain open to provide important banking services. The BOE also said four other big banks in the country would have to improve things in the same manner.
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