Banks are being held back by “punitive” capital requirements for bitcoin despite growing interest in the cryptocurrency, with current Basel rules making the asset “very very inefficient to hold on balance sheet”.
The market is “crying out” for banks to intermediate the trading and holding of bitcoin as collateral, but it is not currently economically feasible for banks to hold the cryptocurrency on their balance sheets, said Arnab Sen, chief executive of GFO-X, a UK-based exchange for digital asset derivatives.
