The former British finance minister and crypto-bull established, Rishi Sunak, will soon replace Liz Truss as the country’s Prime Minister.
Liz Truss was ejected from her leadership position just 45 days after taking office, after her ambitious plan to cut taxes on the country’s top earners quickly backfired. Mortgage prices skyrocketed in the aftermath, while the pound crashed, quickly making Liz Truss unpopular with the vast majority of Britons.
Her replacement, newly chosen by his Conservative Party colleagues, was the only candidate to receive the support of more than 100 legislators. This made him the only member eligible to run in the election, making him win by default.
“I can confirm that we have received a valid nomination, and that Rishi Sunak is therefore elected to lead the Conservative Party“said Graham Brady, a party official.
Rishi Sunak on crypto
Liz Truss showed online support for a lightly regulated approach to crypto in 2018, but made few comments about the industry outside of that.
Rishi Sunak, on the other hand, made the case for turning Britain into a true crypto hub earlier this year.
Some of Rishi Sunak’s ambitions include turning stablecoins into a “recognized form of payment“in the United Kingdom while creating a “financial infrastructure sandbox” to help companies innovate in the sector.
“We want to see the businesses of tomorrow – and the jobs they create – here in the UK, and by regulating effectively, we can give them the confidence they need to think and invest for the long term,” Sunak said in April.
Before politics, Rishi Sunak worked as a hedge fund manager at investment bank Goldman Sachs in the United States. Elected to parliament in 2015, he was then appointed chancellor of the exchequer in 2020, just before the pandemic began.
In October of last year, Rishi Sunak expressed enthusiasm for the possible issuance of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) at the Bank of England, which could “offer businesses and consumers new ways to pay.“
A few months earlier, he had announced the creation of a joint Treasury-Central Bank task force to study how CBDCs could work as a complement to cash and bank deposits.
The Conservative Party of Canada also elected in September a “Bitcoin bull“, Pierre Poilievre. His political opponents have since turned this support into a vector of attack.