3rd June 2025 > > The UK & the US.

tl;dr

Well, well, well, it’s the UK again, to everyone’s collective surprise. GENIUS comes back for a final debate and a vote.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

Three consecutive days of outflows of over $1bn in total from the spot BTC ETFs set a disappointing scene for the start of June. If that trend continues, we will see price weakness soon.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – The UK

This is uncanny.

I think this is the third time in less than a week that the UK has cropped up in the CCC. The UK has previously always been so unwelcoming to the crypto revolution it rarely gets a mention. The last Conservative government so consistently lied about its intentions for cryptos on an industrial scale, it frequently earnt the plaudits of Putin, Xi, Kim Jong-Un, et al, for the sheer audacity of it all.

Our government has changed stripes, and now I am beginning to think that the potential thawing towards cryptos that the CCC first commented on a few days ago, appears to be gaining some traction.

IG Group, an online platform used mostly to trade futures (to be more precise, contracts for differences) on stocks and commodities, is branching out into spot trading of cryptos. And get this – for retail investors. Retail investors in the UK have long had challenges getting involved in spot cryptos. I still argue on a regular basis with my personal banker about making fiat deposits to Coinbase:

“Oh, it’s not something we support.

Yes, it is, because I have transferred £x over the last decade or so to Coinbase, and you know that.

OK, but Compliance says otherwise. Let me get back to you.

Please do.”

Later that day:

“Because it is you, the transfer is approved.”

Repeat, ad infinitum.

I think life is more difficult for those who are unable to demonstrate such a deep involvement in the crypto industry than I. If those challenges disappear, I suspect there are many investors who might wish to take advantage of the new situation.

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You may be familiar with Uphold, an online wallet that claims you can “trade anything for anything”. I haven’t tested that proposition. My only experience of Uphold as a wallet is as the recipient of BAT (Basic Attention Tokens) that I am awarded in exchange for using Brave as my browser. It seems to work fine to me, but it does of course suffer from all the usual issues around hot wallets. Surprisingly, Uphold does not offer a Ledger connection, which is something they should surely do.

Uphold is providing the front-end integration for the IG website. The range of cryptos available will be limited to BTC, ETH, and the large caps. And that is ok. In fact, it is better than ok. Alt speculation is mostly best left for the fairies/mad people (delete as you wish).

The question I have, which is a custodial issue, is who has access to the private keys? Uphold works like MetaMask and Phantom, for which the user is responsible for key management. Will that still be the case for crypto investors using IG as their fiat on-ramp? If not, who is the custodian?

…                             

More importantly, this shows that TradFi companies are increasingly confident about providing crypto services to UK clients, surely in recognition that the previous “ban it all” mindset is being jettisoned.

I look forward to seeing this new initiative bring a whole new cohort of investors into the crypto space.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – The US

The GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins) comes back to the floor of the Senate for its last debate, and hopefully a positive vote to allow it to proceed to the House of Representatives, where its passage will be easier.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has opened up the debate to potential amendments, of which more than fifty have been filed, most of which have nothing to do with regulation of stablecoins. Some may be genuine attempts to hitch a ride on the coattails of GENIUS, others may be stalking horses in a back-handed attempt to stop the legislation passing.

The position taken by the naysayers is self-contradictory whilst also being logically flawed. The criticism that cryptos operate in a largely unregulated environment is a fair one. But to resolve that situation requires legislation creating the regulation. Preventing that from happening does not solve any problems at all – it merely perpetuates the current, unsatisfactory, and unsustainable settlement. One can only draw the conclusion that the critique of lacking regulation is merely a means of attacking cryptos in principle, putting those that do so on the wrong side of history.