How Prime Minister Rishi Sunak may be proponent for pushing crypto advancement in U.K.

Yahoo Finance reporter David Hollerith explains how the election of UK's new crypto-friendly prime minister Rishi Sunak could mean the possibility of the UK becoming a crypto hub going forward.

Video Transcript

DAVE BRIGGS: Rishi Sunak is the youngest PM in modern history. He's the first Hindu and first person of color to lead the UK. Will he also be the first crypto bro leader? David Hollerith here with that story. I know crypto bro may not be the correct term. Maybe it's crypto bull, David. But is that the deal?

DAVID HOLLERITH: Yeah, I mean, the former finance minister's new role as leader of the Uk's Conservative Party obviously paves his way to becoming the prime minister. And this is interesting in the fact that just back in April, under-- as part of Boris Johnson's cabinet, Sunak proposed a series of initiatives to make the UK more crypto-friendly. This included sort of pushing forward a new law that would allow dollar pegged stablecoins to be used in everyday payments, and also asking the UK's royal mint to, well, mint an NFT.

And in preparation, he has actually met with members of more of the venture community side of crypto and also done roundtables with other crypto companies, such as asset manager Bitwise and Solana Labs. So we're looking at a politician here, I think at the bare minimum, who has a lot more direct exposure to the crypto industry than, say, most world leaders. So this is, obviously, a very interesting development from that standpoint.

SEANA SMITH: Yeah, it could potentially be very bullish here for crypto, at least in the longer term. What do you think, though, does this mean just in terms of the odds of making the UK a crypto hub?

DAVID HOLLERITH: Yeah, I mean, I think, Seana, it's-- I think a lot of this does become a marketing thing, you know, where a country wants to sort of tout, you know, what they can do. We've seen this with smaller cities in the US, for example. And obviously, the US itself has also been pushing forward with crypto with Biden ever since Biden's executive order on cryptocurrency.

But that being said, I think that, really, what the industry and regulators want to see is some sort of clarification on regulations. Now, whether those regulations are tougher or more friendly is sort of what it comes down to. And sort of taking a step back, Sunak obviously is inheriting increasing financial stability concerns in the UK, ever since we've seen trouble with the British pound.

So I think right now, it might be a little bit early to expect any sort of extreme sort of policy recovery, sort of what he talked about back in April before the crypto market showed its own example of financial instability. But I think it's definitely on the menu down the line, and it does bode well for the UK, more broadly, in terms of its fintech industry.