FSB to Treat Crypto Companies like Banks

The Financial Stability Board aims to treat companies offering cryptocurrency services the same as banks in its upcoming regulatory framework.

The world’s largest financial watchdog, the FSB, plans to roll out regulatory guidelines for crypto in 2023.

According to the Financial Times, the FSB intends to set out a timeline for global regulators in the coming months. It will enable them to implement its first recommendations on global crypto regulation, it added.

The move is part of an accelerated push to regulate and restrict crypto activities following a year of high-profile company catastrophes. However, what most policymakers fail to grasp is that crypto is not the culprit, it is the people running these centralized lending companies that have been at fault.

Secretary General of the FSB, Dietrich Domanski, told the FT that the regulator was seeking a clear way forward for the crypto industry. Dispelling fears that they were about to quash the fledgling financial sector, he added:

“Many crypto market participants argue that authorities are hostile to innovation. I would say so far, authorities have been fairly accommodating . . . recent events have reinforced the recognition that it is indeed urgent to address risks.”

However, he also said that the objective would be to regulate crypto service providers the same as banks “if they provide the same service that banks provide.”

Domanski said that such rules would prevent the Terra and FTX calamities since neither would have met “the criteria for sound governance.”

In other words, the FSB appears to want to ban all crypto companies that do not meet the criteria for a banking license, which is pretty much all of them.

Following the 2008 financial crisis (which was caused by banks), the FSB implemented a global policy to force banks to raise billions and implement tighter risk management frameworks.