Skip to main content

Basel Committee presses on with restrictive requirements for banks’ crypto holdings

The committee of central banks and regulators has proposed a “conservative prudential treatment” of crypto assets that banking groups say is prohibitive.

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision met Friday and discussed cryptocurrency, among other topics. The committee stated that it would soon publish its second consultative paper with the intention of finalizing guidelines on the prudential treatment of crypto exposure by banks by year-end. 

In a Tuesday press release, the committee issued the following statement, which was likely in reference to the recent collapse of the Terra ecosystem:

“Recent developments have further highlighted the importance of having a global minimum prudential framework to mitigate risks from cryptoassets.”

The committee began consultations on the banking sector's risk exposure to cryptocurrency in 2021 and published a paper on its findings at that time. The committee divided crypto assets into two groups, with tokenized traditional assets and stablecoins forming one group, and all others forming the second. A 1,250% risk weight was assigned to the second group, which included all cryptocurrencies and their derivatives. That meant a bank was expected to hold $1 in fiat money for every $1 worth of cryptocurrency it held.

The committee’s “conservative prudential treatment” led to objections from banking industry groups. The International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA), the Futures Industry Association (FIA), the Institute of International Finance, the Chamber of Digital Commerce and five other organizations said in a letter to the committee that the proposed requirements amounted to “material impediments to regulated bank participation in crypto asset markets.”

Related: Crypto needs regulation but should be done right: Report and database

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision is made up of central banks and regulators from 28 countries and jurisdictions, as well as three observer countries and five agencies. It is supported by the Bank for International Settlements, but its decisions do not carry the force of law.



from https://ift.tt/U051Xco
https://ift.tt/AFoxHu2

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

ENS DAO delegates offer perspective on DAO governance and decentralized identity

AlphaWallet CEO and Spruce co-founder talk about their roles as contributors to the Ethereum Name Service following the project's recent airdrop. Earlier this month, the Ethereum Name Service, or ENS, formed a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, for the ENS community.  Cointelegraph spoke to two ENS DAO delegates who applied for the opportunity to represent the community and stay involved in the decision making process: Victor Zhang, CEO of AlphaWallet, an open source Ethereum wallet, and Gregory Rocco, co-founder of Spruce, a decentralized ID and data toolkit for developers. Zhang spoke about his experience as an external contributor to ENS and an early supporter since 2018. Zhang initially sought to help ENS by offering Alpha Wallet as a user-friendly tool for  resolving .eth names and cryptocurrency wallet addresses. Essentially, if a user inputs an .eth name in the AlphaWallet, it will show the wallet address, and vice versa using reverse resolution. Alpha...

How Social Platform Chingari is Using Web 3.0 to Transform the Traditional Way We Use Social Media

The world is changing. This isn’t news to anyone, but sometimes it is nice to realize that—contrary to news headlines—not all the change is bad.  In fact, the last decade has seen so much innovation and so many improvements to technology that even 2015 seems like a different world.  Internet speeds, connecting with anyone globally (for free), and our ability to reach large groups of people without a middleman is nothing short of revolutionary. When it comes to technology evolution, this often happens with different iterations.  Once a system is mature, there’s a better idea of what we would like to change and improve.  We go back to the drawing board, target our creative minds at the issues, and create a new version that has evolved to better meet our needs.  The Internet has followed this model since its inception, evolving through three distinct stages.  We are only at the cusp of the third stage, called Web 3.0, with technologies such as blockchain and ...

Lightning Network Exploits Continue to Hinder the Bitcoin Scaling Solution

via Bitcoin News https://ift.tt/3mGmODQ While bitcoin has run-up to all new price highs in 2020, a great number of crypto supporters have been complaining about the mempool backlog and the high fees needed to send a transaction. Meanwhile, the Lightning Network is far from seeing widespread adoption, and a number of attack vectors have been revealed this year. At the time of publication, the Bitcoin ( BTC ) mempool (backlog of transactions) shows 113,000+ unconfirmed transactions and the backlog hasn’t been this high since 2017. When the bull run took place three years ago, transaction fees and unconfirmed transactions shot through the roof. Currently, according to bitcoinfees.cash data on October 31, the next BTC block fee is $10.77 and the current median fee is $6.43. Even with the high fees and the mempool clog , the greater bitcoin community is still transacting mostly onchain. The Layer 2 protocol built on top of Bitcoin called the Lightning Network (LN) was supposed to eas...