Cryptocurrency—who’s in charge?

Cryptocurrency is an experimental technology. But it’s also now a $2.5trn market with growing and increasingly complex linkages to the traditional financial system—whether through ETFs, the futures market, central clearing, repo or prime brokerage.So who’s in charge if things go wrong, as they inevitably will at some point? To answer that question, I invited Angela Walch, a professor of law at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas, and a research associate at the Centre for Blockchain Technologies at University College London, to the New Money Review podcast.Walch was one of the first academics to look in detail at the governance of cryptocurrency, a topic often downplayed by promoters of the idea that cryptocurrency networks are decentralised, immutable and trustless. In a recent testimony to the US Senate committee on banking, housing and urban affairs, Walsh warned that “flaws in academic, industry, and public understanding of cryptocurrencies can taint policy decisions, embedding risk to be revealed when reality bites.”Listen to the podcast to hear Angela Walch share her views on:Why the reality of cryptocurrency governance doesn’t match the narrativeCryptocurrency and systemic riskThe declining trust in financial system governanceHow decentralised is bitcoin and DeFi?Where hidden power resides within cryptocurrency systemsPast episodes of critical bugs in bitcoin and ethereumInsider trading and information asymmetry in cryptoApplying the existing infrastructure rules to cryptocurrencyWhy we need a new regulator for cryptocurrency—and fastWhy crypto system operators gain limited liability by default