This week, Germany's top regulator urged international regulation of the cryptocurrency sector to protect consumers, prevent money laundering, and preserve financial stability.

The head of Germany's financial market regulator BaFin, Mark Branson, said it was the wrong strategy to take a passive stance and simply let the business expand as a playground for grownups.

"We've seen the self-regulated world. It will not work," Branson told journalists in Frankfurt on Tuesday evening.

Branson spoke just hours after Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was charged by American authorities with misappropriating billions of dollars and violating campaign laws in what has been described potentially one of the biggest financial frauds in American history.

Branson asserts that there may be a "crypto spring" following the "crypto winter," but the industry that emerges is likely to be more closely related to conventional banking, necessitating more regulation.

He declared that the moment had come for serious cryptocurrency regulation.

"The most important point is that it doesn't need just a European solution. It needs a worldwide solution."

Only minimally and unevenly has the industry been governed. In order to deal with cryptocurrency, banks in Germany require licences.

The European Union has been working on a revised Markets in Crypto Assets Regulation (MiCA), which some individuals, including Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, feel needs to be expanded in a follow-up version and dubbed "MiCA 2."

Branson has previously been pessimistic about the industry. In an interview published on the ECB website on November, he claimed that “not all crypto business models are serious.” "Waves of innovation, as we know, also bring with them freeloaders and crooks," he said.