As an update on Guido’s story about banks warring with each other over crypto, George Osborne has waded in by backing tokenised assets. Lots of interventions from the coalition bigwigs today…
Osborne, who is an adviser to OpenAI, told the Digital Asset Summit in London that when he was Chancellor the Treasury began the push for open banking, which requires the big banks to let customers share their data with competitors. A monopoly was broken…
The podcaster and former Chancellor argued that tokenisation could work in a similar way for assets most people have never been able to own like shares in private companies. The main banks want all the control for themselves…
On a panel with crypto company Coinbase, Osborne said:
“I’m not saying we sat in Treasury and foresaw that that was going to happen, but we knew if you broke up some of the monopolistic practices that basically worked against us, something would come of it. And I think there’s something similar here with traditional finance, which is the use of tokenisation. Who knows how clever people in the distributed database industry will parcel up the ownership of assets that have not really been available to the general population… You know, it’s hard to get a share of a private company…
If you revolutionise and open up decentralised finance and tokenisation … I can only think it’s going to be moving in one direction – spread ownership. And I think one of the central policy challenges in the Treasury today, here or in any other Treasury, is how am I going to spread capital assets? … The solution to that is make sure the general population are getting some share of that return to capital.”
Meanwhile the EU is pushing ahead with plans to launch a ‘Digital Euro’. 1984 is just around the corner…
Lucy Powell told Sky News that the Ed Miliband-Russell Brand interview happened in part because the ‘social media age’ had not begun by 2015:
“Look, I mean, he approached the Labour Party, he approached the campaign team, and we’re in very different times now. We weren’t in the social media age at the time – where you could maybe search things up and see allegations about somebody at the time. and as I say, if there was any suggestion at all, we were dealing with someone who was a known sexual predator at the time, then, of course, you know, no one would have done that. But as I say, he was a well known public figure. Lots of people from Hollywood to the BBC to many others gave this person a very, very powerful platform. And we didn’t know at the time, unfortunately. It was a different era.”