The Tribune

By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

A FORMER Bahamas Financial Services Board (BFSB) chief executive yesterday asserted this nation had “no choice” but to regulate the digital assets industry and was now in a “better place” for doing so.

Aliya Allen, now an attorney and partner at the Graham, Thompson & Company law firm, told the Nassau Conference that the evolution of crypto currencies, blockchain and other related assets and technology will continue to change how the global financial services business operates.

As to whether The Bahamas should have been among the first-movers into the digital assets space, she said: “We have to decide as a jurisdiction where we want to be in a life cycle of a new business. Do want to be at the beginning, where things are just forming? Do we want to enter in the middle, where regulatory rules are there but unclear? Or do we want to wait until every other jurisdiction as a regime has attracted significant amounts of business?”

Noting that the global digital assets industry is in a so-called “crypto-winter”, where both winners and losers will emerge due to the dramatic plunge in value of cryptocurrencies, she added: “There will be a lot of other things, but there will certainly be some winners out of it. And those winners could be from The Bahamas, and why shouldn’t they be?

“We really don’t have a choice but to regulate the digital asset business. The FATF (Financial Action Task Force) has told us: ‘You have to regulate digital assets.’ What we have done as a jurisdiction is said: ‘We want to regulate it, and we want to be friendly to those businesses. That’s actually pretty good government policy to actually identify something that you want to develop right now.”

Antoine Bastian, Genesis Fund Services’ executive chairman, added: “If you see cryptocurrency funds or vehicles, it’s basically individuals or families who are putting together a structure, and that’s it. From a trading perspective you have to have this game well-regulated, because there are a lot of bad apples.

“Not because I know that there are a lot of bad apples, but because that’s just the nature of anything emerging, I believe. So regulation kind of weeds them out, hopefully, quickly.”