A Week on from Donald Trump’s historic second visit to the UK, and with a new £150Bn deal on the cards, Keir Starmer might be emerging as the UK crypto industry’s most unlikely ally.
Keir Starmer did not run on a crypto platform. Yet a week of transatlantic policymaking has positioned the British prime minister as an unexpected accelerant for the industry’s next expansion, aligned, paradoxically, with the impulses of Elon Musk’s America-first, innovation-at-speed crypto zeitgeist.
If the British government moves quickly, the UK can convert regulatory ambiguity into a competitive moat and capture flows now ricocheting between New York, Dubai, and Singapore.
The catalyst is structural, not rhetorical. London and Washington have formed the Transatlantic Taskforce for Markets of the Future, co-chaired by the US Treasury and HM Treasury, to deliver short-to-medium term recommendations on digital assets, stablecoins, and wholesale market digitization within 180 days.
It is the first serious attempt by the two financial superpowers to align crypto rulemaking and reduce friction for cross-border listings, custody, and capital raising.
For issuers and market-makers, this signals a path to dual-jurisdiction clarity on tokenized securities, ETF plumbing, and stablecoin reserves, areas where fragmentation has suppressed institutional participation.
Starmer’s room to maneuver widened further when the UK and US signed a broader technology memorandum covering AI and advanced energy worth £150Bn.
The political optics are banal; the market signal is not. Joint tech industrial policy lowers the temperature around crypto’s culture-war baggage. It reframes digital assets as infrastructure, rails for settlement, collateral, and programmability that sit alongside AI in national competitiveness strategies.
In parallel, US policy has pivoted toward accommodation: a stablecoin statute is now law; the SEC has eased the path for digital-asset ETFs; and the White House is using executive authority to expand regulatory sandboxes. That creates a synchronizing window London can exploit.
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Domestically, the pieces are moving. The Financial Conduct Authority has cut average crypto registration timelines by roughly two-thirds since the woes of 2024, even as approvals remain selective and many firms pause applications ahead of a fuller legislative regime.
The FCA has opened consultation on minimum standards tailored to crypto platforms and, controversially, floated limited exemptions from some legacy conduct “Principles” to allow business models that don’t map neatly onto MiFID-era assumptions.
Paired with HM Treasury’s commitment to regulate within the Financial Services and Markets Act perimeter rather than rewiring an EU-style MiCA clone, the UK is edging toward a pragmatic, common-law-driven framework that could prove more adaptable to tokenized collateral, on-chain funds distribution, and 24/7 market operations.
The timing is propitious. US spot ETFs for Bitcoin and Ethereum have normalized institutional exposure, while the first US-listed DOGE and XRP ETFs broaden the product set and investor funnel.
A transatlantic alignment on disclosures, surveillance-sharing, and custody segregation would let UK venues list equivalent products without reinventing the wheel, while allowing British issuers to tap US demand for tokenized treasuries, private credit and money-market instruments.
For Musk-world capital, VCs, corporates and liquidity providers hunting for aligned jurisdictions, an agile UK framework paired with US interoperability is precisely the “don’t fight City Hall” signal that de-risks deployment.
Execution, however, is everything. The FCA’s historical rejection rate, driven by AML and operational resilience failures, will remain a drag unless the registration regime becomes more transparent, better resourced, and visibly consistent.
The government must also reconcile consumer-duty goals with market-structure realities in crypto, where high volatility and non-custodial interfaces are features, not bugs.
And it cannot ignore continental dynamics: France is pressing to curb MiCA “passporting,” and several EU authorities want ESMA to directly supervise major crypto firms, moves that could either push activity toward London or complicate equivalence discussions if the UK diverges too sharply.
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First, hard-date the taskforce deliverables and pre-commit to implementing any bilateral “lowest-friction” recommendations on custody, market abuse, and stablecoin reserve audits.
Second, legislate a lean authorization regime that upgrades current registrations into full permissions without forcing firms through duplicative processes.
Third, anchor a UK-US pilot for tokenized gilts and treasuries with interoperable settlement and reciprocal listing routes for digital-asset ETFs. This initiative would pull liquidity to London overnight.
Finally, the above will be paired with visible enforcement against scams and weak compliance to keep the consumer protection mandate intact.
Do that, and the UK stops being a spectator in a market it helped invent.
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The post Keir Starmer, UK Crypto Industry’s Most Unlikely Ally? Why the UK Just Became Crypto’s Dark-Horse Bet appeared first on 99Bitcoins.
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