Central banks want to look under crypto’s hood — Is this a positive sign?

The Bank for International Settlements’ (BIS) Project Atlas report offers yet another indication that the worlds of crypto and traditional finance may be converging.

On the surface, this proof-of-concept project backed by some of Europe’s biggest central banks — like German central bank Deutsche Bundesbank and Dutch central bank De Nederlandsche Bank — seems modest enough: securing more crypto-related data, like cross-border Bitcoin
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But the mere fact that these giants of the incumbent financial order now want such information suggests that crypto assets and decentralized finance (DeFi) applications are becoming, in the report’s words, “part of an emerging financial ecosystem that spans the globe.”

BIS, a bank for central banks, and its partners still have some serious concerns about this new ecosystem, including its “lack of transparency.” For instance, it’s still hard to find seemingly simple things, like the countries where crypto exchanges are domiciled.