This mainstreaming of crypto by traditional financial institutions and regulators is exciting. But these banks are mostly tokenizing on permissioned networks, which regulators are encouraging. In December, while announcing plans to revise its bank capital standard for crypto-assets, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision stated that since permissionless blockchains “create risks that cannot be sufficiently mitigated at present”, the highest bank capital requirements would be retained for crypto-assets held on permissionless blockchains. The Committee probably concluded this because permissionless blockchains are maintained by thousands of validators that are not subject to regulatory authorities, while permissioned networks would be controlled by banks.
