UK lawmakers form a cross party crypto advocacy group for parliament
According to news reports, Member of Parliament at United Kingdom’s House of Commons, Lisa Cameron, is chairing a lobbying group that is aiming to promote crypto-related legislation in the country’s government.
According to a January 7 news report from the Financial Times, UK Parliament’s members, as well as members from the House of Lords, have jointly launched the Crypto and Digital Assets Group.
This group has been launched for ensuring rules in the crypto industry as part of the UK’s “support innovation” program. The cross-party group is aimed at protecting investors from financial crimes, including those of token scams and offerings arising out of regulated companies.
Cameron has said that financial investors in the crypto sector are faced currently with “a crucial time” as global policymakers have also been reviewing their approach to cryptocurrencies and their regulation.
At such a time, United Kingdom’s self-regulating trade group for the crypto industry, CryptoUK, has been reported to be backing the creation of the cross parties advocacy group.
According to CryptoUK’s Executive Director, Ian Taylor, the group intends at spending a sum of more than $67,000 across 2022 for supporting the Crypto and Digital Assets Group, with a special focus on “education, education, education” around crypto offerings and assets.
In the year 2021, the UK Financial Conduct Authority had been issuing numerous warnings to retail investors, as word of advice for them to withdraw from the potential risk of dealing with crypto firms that are not yet registered with the country’s financial governing body.
The UK Advertising Standards Authority, which is the country’s independent advertising regulator, has also removed advertisements from crypto agencies and firms including Coinbase and Kraken.
The growing concern over crypto scams, exploitative trading and illicit transactions in the United Kingdom have come to increase, as per a report from Chainalysis.
The report has shown scammers receiving the sum of $7.8 billion in crypto that had originally been stolen from victims in the year 2021, of which over $2.8 billion have come from rug pulls alone.
Chainalysis has attributed the prevalence of rug pulls in its report to the “hype around the space”, in addition to lack of coding audits for major DeFi projects.
