Biden is right: the crypto world needs to be controlled

President Biden’s executive order ‘Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets’ won praise on all sides, an unfamiliar experience for one routinely dismissed these days as lacking the vigour or grip needed for presidential leadership. The order does little more than call for cross-government research into all things crypto. But in doing so it pleased bitcoin fanciers, NFT collectors and their ilk by acknowledging that their $3 trillion market is here to stay – while also giving comfort to sceptics who’d prefer to see crypto dealings brought under regulatory control like any other financial activity, rather than abandoned to the libertarian anarchy favoured by ardent cryptonauts.

But that latter fantasy can’t happen until cryptocurrencies become so universal that they no longer need to interface with dollars and pounds. And the companies that provide that exchange can’t operate outside corporate rules, so we’re seeing the likes of Coinbase, Binance and Kraken falling into line, however reluctantly, by blocking suspect Russian accounts.