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Something dawned on me yesterday that I’ve been thinking about since. I’ve suspected it for a while, but the latest news pretty much confirms my hunch: U.K. banks hate crypto.
Some of you probably saw that Barclays contacted a bunch of its U.K. customers yesterday. Specifically, BINANCE users. Barclays was writing to inform them that it would be blocking card payments to the exchange, citing the recent FCA warning regarding Binance.
The full message read:
“As you’ve made a payment to Binance this year, we wanted to let you know that we’re stopping payments made by credit/debit card to them until further notice. This is to help keep your money safe. For further info, please search FCA Binance online. We’re sorry for any disruption this may cause you. Your Barclays Team”
Some will argue that this is a Binance-specific case, but you only need to look a little deeper to see that the Barclays move isn’t an isolated incident. Natwest, another of the biggest high street banks here on the other side of the pond, recently began limiting transactions to crypto exchanges because of a “high volume of scams.”
There’s also HSBC, which banned customers from buying MSTR on its trading platform due to MicroStrategy’s exposure to Bitcoin. HSBC is “not into Bitcoin as an asset class” according to its CEO Neil Quinn; he also said he had concerns with stablecoins.
Barclays and Natwest have claimed that they’re only taking action to protect customers, but I’m not sure if I’m fully sold on that. These institutions are incentivized to stop crypto from snowballing, and they’ve probably not even clocked on to the yields paid in DeFi yet. Once they do, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more DeFi-specific attacks in the future.
The curious thing is that plenty of other banks are taking the opposite approach. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, two of the world’s largest financial behemoths, have been particularly bullish: they’ve published many in-depth reports, forecast bold price targets, and generally started paying attention to everything that’s going on in this space. Hell, they’ve even started offering crypto products, something none of us would have envisaged even a year ago.
As crypto snowballs, banks and other legacy institutions will have to choose a side of the fence to sit on. We’re seeing this play out with nation states too: China is doing everything it can to oust Bitcoin from the country, while President Nayib Bukele has vowed to use volcanoes to mine coins in El Salvador.
I guess the only really question left to ask is who will be on our side when the time comes to truly reap the rewards as those institutions will be here long into the future and are the banks i'd like to give my business too!
