A former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, has told Yahoo Finance that big finance will certainly get into the crypto space. He said that “trading characteristics” that we normally associate with crypto assets will be used more and more to the point where we see conventional assets also tokenised.
Typically, responses to cryptocurrency from governmental officials and financial institutions have been negative but Philip Hammond’s comments are a big departure from what we’re used to hearing. According to Hammond, the trend towards tokenisation and distributed ledger technology is now “unstoppable” and wants the UK’s huge financial sector to keep up with the changes so competitors don’t get ahead.
While it’s nice to hear officials finally acknowledging the benefits of these new technologies, Hammond did still provide a little bit of bad news. He said that using these new technologies would be very disruptive to the existing financial service infrastructure. Those who will bear the biggest brunt of the changes will be incumbents who will have more legacy systems to update.
Should Hammond’s forecast be correct, it will be a massive shift from what we’ve seen in years past. It can be a bit hard to remember now, but if you go back about eight years, Bitcoin was predominantly known for buying drugs on the Silk Road and other criminal activities; to finally have the technologies born by cryptocurrency finally used in a mainstream way will be very notable.