"We're looking at politician who has a lot more direct exposure to the Crypto industry than most world leaders". Yahoo! finance
While he was Chancellor, Rishi Sunak - the wealthy hedge-fund guy who sold us Boris Johnson - met crypto-asset manager Bitwise and Solana Labs, and leading tech/crypto venture firms Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz, among others. Then he committed the UK to be a "global hub for cryptoasset technology" and commissioned the Royal Mint to "issue a non-fungible token (NFT) by the end of the year “as an emblem of the forward-looking approach the UK is determined to take.” [my emphasis on the weasel words]." Of course, that NFT thing never happened. But Sunak did drive plans to regulate 'stablecoins' as a means of payment - in a way that gave him (as Chancellor) the ability to change the qualifying definition.
To give you some insight into Sunak's Crypto meetings: before the collapse of his FTX house of cards, Sam Bankman-Fried was a "big supporter of Solana" which is itself no stranger to controversy; Sequoia was the leading venture firm backing FTX, with $150m, while Sequoia's own investment funds received $200m via FTX's trading arm, Alameda Research; and Andreessen Horowitz led a $314m 'private token sale' by Solana. Meanwhile, Bitwise also has a stake in Solana and, among many boosterish claims, Bitwise CIO says the reason why the price of Ether is drifting sideways is that it's being suppressed by general Crypto industry bad news rather than, say, the fact that Ethereum mining is no longer profitable.
Like the Tory Party (and Sunak's government), the Crypto currency world (as opposed to many plausible but mundane scenarios for deploying distributed ledger tech generally) lacks substance and is rancid with infuriating boosterism. So it may simply be that Rishi feels at home in both camps.
But based on his career progression and political record, my sense is that whatever Rishi's selling you'd be a damn fool to buy...
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