Wall Street’s crypto FOMO fades as market falls, says Hsu

Bloomberg

Wall Street banks’ interest in crypto has significantly fallen off as digital-asset prices have tumbled, according to a top US financial regulator.
“A lot of the crypto curiosity went away,” Michael Hsu, acting head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, said in an interview at Bloomberg’s Washington bureau. “I would be astounded if a lot of banks were saying, ‘Hey, I really want to get into crypto’ now.”
It’s a stark difference from the interest that banks showed at the end of last year, when the price of Bitcoin, the largest digital asset, was at an all-time high and the total crypto market was worth more than $3 trillion, he added. The industry “took off” and there was a lot of “FOMO,” he said, referring to an acronym that stands for “fear of missing out.”
The crypto industry has seen its fair share of turmoil over the past few months with the price of tokens plummeting, the collapse of the TerraUSD stablecoin and, more recently, FTX’s implosion. The current “crypto winter” has given US banking regulators more time to mull substantive guidance on issues such as crypto custody, Hsu said.