The Commonwealth bank of Australia(CBA) has announced that it has halted the trading of crypto through its app amid the volatility in the market.
In November, CBA announced a plan to allow its customers to trade crypto including bitcoin and ethereum through its app.
The bank had planned an initial pilot, which would include 10 crypto assets and then “progressively [rolling out] more features to more customers in 2022.”
However, seeing the extremely volatile market of the past few weeks the CBA has halted trading of the crypto’s.
Users of the initial pilot have not been able to continue trading on the app.
“As events of the last week have reinforced, it is clearly a very volatile sector that remains an enormous amount of interest,” said Matt Comyn, the chief executive of the Commonwealth Bank.
“But alongside that volatility and awareness and I guess the scale, certainly globally, you can see there is a lot of interest from regulators and people thinking about the best way to regulate that.”
Australia’s Federal Treasury is consulting regulations for crypto, taking suggestions until May 27.
Comyn continued, “Our intention still, at this stage is to restart the pilot, but there is still a couple of things that we want to work through on a regulatory front to make sure that that is most appropriate.”
Crypto and stablecoins have been under increased scrutiny after the crash of LunaUST. The crash wiped out millions of dollars from the market, causing massive losses to investors.
Read Also: Australian Crypto ETFs Launch Amidst Market Crash
The crash also consequently slowed down the crypto market, tanking the trading volume as investors now take a careful approach.
