UK folds on plan to regulate crypto like gambling

The original gambling proposal came in May, and the Treasury said it ran “completely counter to globally agreed recommendations”

article-image

Andrew Angelov/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks

share

The British government has rejected a proposal to regulate crypto trading and investing as if it were gambling. 

Economic Secretary to the HM Treasury Andrew Griffith has “firmly” disagreed with the UK Parliament’s Treasury Committee’s idea to police “retail trading and investment activity in unbacked cryptoassets as gambling rather than as a financial service.”

In the May report, the Committee considered bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) “unbacked cryptoassets” that have “no intrinsic value” and serve “no useful social purpose.”

Griffith argued that rendering crypto trading synonymous with gambling, instead of bringing it under a “financial services regulatory framework,” would oppose established recommendations from “international organizations and standard-setting bodies.”

One such body mentioned was the UK Financial Stability Board, which published a set of nine guidelines for regulating crypto in October 2022. Nowhere in the 77-page document does the FSB suggest bringing crypto asset activity under the umbrella of the Gambling Commission as the Committee had requested.

Griffith also said that the gambling rules approach could fail to mitigate “critical risks” to consumers such as “market manipulation, inadequate prudential arrangements, and deficiencies in core financial risk management practices.”

The UK government published a consultation paper in February 2023 in its first major foray into crypto regulation, professing a desire to work with digital asset firms “to develop a regulatory framework.”

More recently, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority has mulled plans to rein in crypto memes.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

Industry City | Brooklyn, NY

TUES - THURS, JUNE 24 - 26, 2025

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

Brooklyn, NY

SUN - MON, JUN. 22 - 23, 2025

Blockworks and Cracked Labs are teaming up for the third installment of the Permissionless Hackathon, happening June 22–23, 2025 in Brooklyn, NY. This is a 36-hour IRL builder sprint where developers, designers, and creatives ship real projects solving real problems across […]

recent research

Unlocked by Template (7).png

Research

Union’s improvements upon Tendermint consensus through CometBLS, coupled with ZK proving through Galois, allow for a broadly scalable, cost efficient, and low latency IBC implementation that is feasibly scalable across every existing blockchain, virtual machine and runtime. The implementation offers modular crosschain interoperability without the need for trusted intermediaries.  

article-image

Kraken’s chief security officer Nick Percoco said the exchange turned the tables on a North Korean hacker

article-image

Or is it approximately the least cypherpunk thing we could do?

article-image

Over 20% of SOL-USD swap volume goes through SolFi

article-image

CEO Vlad Tenev calls expected clarity on listing crypto asset securities “a big opportunity”

article-image

Big Tech pulled US indexes back into the green Thursday, as investors waited for two more Mag 7 first-quarter reports after the bell

article-image

Charts and takeaways from Tuesday’s jobs report and Wednesday’s GDP print, as the economy digests the tariff war