The European Central Bank (ECB) considers that banks should not promote bitcoin because it is not appropriate as a means of payment or as an investment.
This is argued by the regulator's economists Ulrich Bindseil, general director of the ECB's Payments and Market Infrastructures division, and Jürgen Schaaf, senior management advisor in the same area of activity, in an analysis published yesterday on the institution's blog.
“The financial industry should be cautious about the long-term damage of promoting investments in bitcoin despite the short-term benefits they can give”, they warn after the analysis of the cryptoactive market carried out after the collapse due to the bankruptcy of the FTX platform .
They consider that the technological and design deficiencies question the use of bitcoin as a means of payment and also as an investment beyond speculation and seem to lead the cryptocurrency to what they call "irrelevance".
“This was already foreseeable before FTX went bankrupt and sent the bitcoin price well below $16,000,” they warn, recalling that the reference cryptocurrency was exchanged for about $69,000 a year ago.
"The apparent stabilization shows a breather on the way to new heights," they point out before warning that "it is most likely an artificially induced last gasp before the road to irrelevance."
The financial authorities have reinforced their warnings regarding cryptocurrencies since the November 11 official bankruptcy of the FTX platform. It was one of the giants in the cryptocurrency sector, which had come to be valued at more than 32,000 million. After weeks of rumors about his financial capacity, he left the funds of more than a million users blocked and, what is worse, he unleashed a panic in the digital currency market, unleashing a massive withdrawal on other platforms with an alarming knock-on effect. For now, the Bitfront platform, backed by the Asian social network Line (the Chinese WhatsApp), announced that it will close its operations in March 2023. Industry experts predict that not all bankruptcies resulting from contagion can be so orderly.
In Spain, the National Securities Market Commission (CNMC) has been warning the risk of these investments since 2018 and, above all, the gurus who promote this type of investment without warning of the risk they pose for all investors, especially for the less specialized Last Monday, the president of the CNMV, Rodrigo Buenaventura, was especially forceful against this type of investment, describing it as "empty of content" and "useless".
