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The UK financial watchdog has responded to criticism of its cryptocurrency registration scheme by reducing the time it takes to approve an application by two-thirds and accepting a higher proportion of recent applications.
Since the start of April, the Financial Conduct Authority has approved the crypto registrations of five companies, including US investment group BlackRock and UK-based bank Standard Chartered, while six others were rejected, refused or withdrawn, according to data the watchdog gave to the Financial Times.
The 45 per cent acceptance rate is sharply higher than in the previous five years, when the regulator was widely criticised for being too slow to approve applications and only giving the green light to less than 15 per cent of applications it received.
However, the push to make it quicker and easier for crypto companies to secure UK regulatory approval has failed to prevent a sharp drop in the number of applications.
The number of applications from crypto groups fell from 46 in the year to April 2023 to 26 in the year to April 2025. The number of approvals also declined from eight in 2022-23 to only three in 2024-25 — although this has rebounded in the past six months.
Any firms wanting to carry out cryptoasset activities in the UK have had to register under the scheme since the start of 2020 by showing they comply with the FCA’s rules to combat financial crime, including money laundering and terrorist financing.
“We have made a conscious effort to put resources into this,” David Geale, the FCA’s executive director for payments and digital finance, told the FT. “We have sped up our authorisations across the piece and have made some quite significant progress.”
Crypto asset providers that registered in the year to April completed the process in just over five months on average, compared with an average of 17 months for those approved two years earlier, the watchdog said in response to a freedom of information request by law firm Reed Smith.
The shift comes as the FCA prepares to launch a full regulatory framework for the crypto market next year. UK regulators are facing calls to be more accommodating to the fast-growing sector since US authorities adopted a much more crypto-friendly approach under President Donald Trump.
Simon Jennings, executive director of the UK Cryptoasset Business Council trade association, said regulators in Dubai and Singapore were also “actively courting digital asset businesses”.
He added: “We’ve seen first-hand that even multibillion-dollar firms can spend years trying to secure UK authorisation — and the reality is, they won’t wait around forever.”
Although the FCA has added 55 companies to its register, it has been widely viewed as overly cautious about the risks in crypto markets and too slow to allow them to be part of mainstream finance. Both the EU and US have been quicker to regulate the sector and to allow exchange traded funds in crypto assets such as bitcoin to be sold to retail investors.
George Osborne, the former Tory chancellor who is now an adviser to US crypto exchange Coinbase, wrote in the FT last month: “On crypto and stablecoins, as on too many other things, the hard truth is this: we’re being completely left behind. It’s time to catch up.”
The FCA recently started offering preapproval meetings with a case officer to help companies prepare for what was expected of them in the registration process. It has also organised roundtables, webinars and other events to help companies with registering.
“What we tend to get is a better quality of application and that certainly speeds things up,” said Geale. “While we have sped up, that will not have been through any reduction of standards.”
Raphael Landesmann, regulatory counsel at crypto trading firm GSR, said the company was invited to participate in an FCA workshop to advise others on how to register shortly after it did so in December. “We have seen very considerable efforts by the FCA in that regard.”
The UK’s plans to launch a full regulatory framework may have contributed to the decline in applications, by persuading companies thinking of registering with the FCA to hold off until the wider rules are in place.
“I don’t think interest in the UK has dropped, but I do think it’s possible that some firms are pausing to take stock and see how its crypto regulation develops,” said Brett Hillis, a partner at Reed Smith.