Challenger bank Monzo has confirmed it still plans to pursue crypto investment opportunities, amid the current crash in the digital asset market.
Monzo co-founder, Jonas Templestein spoke yesterday at the Financial Times Live event saying the crypto crash “probably hasn’t affected our plans” as the fintech continues to consider branching out into digital currency ventures.
Templestein said that despite the current problems the cryptocurrency market is facing, the underlying technology, and how it allows users to trade assets easily, remain promising in the eyes of Monzo.
“I think from a technology perspective, blockchain technology is super interesting database technology,” Templestein said.
“If you go a little bit further with your imagination, you can think it’s a very interesting distributed virtual machine a way to run sort of like common computing.”
Templestein echoed the opinion of many crypto defenders, calling for regulation and oversight to add a greater level of safety to the trading of cryptoassets.
“It seems now that building an entire financial industry, without any regulators, is not such a great idea,” he said.
“It’s especially not a great idea for the unsophisticated consumers, that by and large, I think have been suffering the last few years.”
Regulation of cryptocurrencies is something of a polarizing topic within the community as it brings into question the decentralised nature of the technology that made it so attractive to many.
However, the crypto crash and the millions lost have brought regulation to the top of the crypto agenda, particularly for the UK’s financial watchdog, which has been struggling to deal with the mass adoption of digital assets.
Last month, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) chair, Charles Randall, gave a speech warning of the dangers of “speculative crypto tokens”.
Randall said: “When the price of Bitcoin can readily halve within six months, as it has done recently, and some other speculative crypto tokens have gone to zero… should people without any significant savings or financial experience be encouraged or permitted to buy speculative crypto at all?”
The post Monzo still considering crypto investments despite market crash appeared first on UKTN | UK Tech News.
