In January 2022, Hayden Adams woke up to find his bank account had been closed. This happened without any pre-warning or even an explanation as to why.
If you don’t know who Adams is, he built Uniswap, a large-scale crypto decentralised exchange. So he’s far from an obscure crypto trader. He also banked with JP Morgan, one of the biggest banks in the world.
A former US regulator called it “a shadow de-banking of crypto.” His theory was that bank examiners had told JP Morgan to drop him, and that the bank couldn’t say so even if it had wanted to.
That was four years ago, in America. You’d hope things had moved on since then. They haven’t. They’ve just moved here.
What is the Crypto and Digital Assets APPG?
Last month, a group of UK politicians opened a formal inquiry into exactly this problem, banking access for crypto companies.
It’s called the Crypto and Digital Assets All-Party Parliamentary Group (or APPG for short), a group of MPs and Lords from different parties who team up to look into one specific issue.
The two MPs co-chairing this, former digital economy Minister Lord Vaizey of Didcot and Labour MP Gurinder Singh Josan, asked businesses to submit evidence by 31 August 2026, to help answer… Why do crypto businesses in the UK still struggle so much to get, and keep, a bank account? This evidence will then be turned into a report.
I’ve spent years finding banking solutions for businesses just like this. So I see the exact same story play out again and again, across completely different industries. I’ve found that it, oftentimes, comes down to the fact that the bank isn’t looking at the business in front of it. It’s looking at the label on the folder.
Just how bad is it, really?
In January 2025, three industry groups surveyed UK crypto and Web3 firms about their banking. Only 14 in every 100 had managed to open an account with a major UK bank and actually keep it.
A year later, the UK Cryptoasset Business Council went back and looked at ten of the UK’s biggest exchanges specifically. It estimated that about 4 in every 10 transactions going to those exchanges are blocked or delayed by banks.
Think about what that means for a real business. It means you can’t pay a supplier on time. It means a customer’s payment sits stuck for days with no stated reason. It means, at worst, you delay a launch or you can’t make payroll, because your bank has decided your entire sector is a problem.
Why does this keep happening?
Banks aren’t sitting down and reviewing each crypto business individually. That would take time, and staff, and money. It’s much cheaper and easier to write one blanket rule for an entire category and apply it to everyone in it.
So, a fully licensed exchange with a spotless compliance record can be treated exactly the same as one with no licence and no oversight at all.
Here’s what really gets me, though. Parliament has already been told all of this. Twice. The Crypto APPG looked at it as part of a much wider inquiry into the UK sector in 2022 and 2023. Banking access came out as one of the most significant barriers it found.
Then, in February 2024, a completely different group, the APPG on Fair Business Banking, ran an inquiry into debanking specifically. It looked at crypto firms, yes, but also jewellers, yacht brokers, bookmakers, and Russian-heritage customers who lost their accounts after the invasion of Ukraine for no reason other than where they were from. That report coined it Debanking, and agreed that it was often not fair or effective.
It also recorded what the people on the receiving end said about it. That financial crime is being used as, in their words, “a fig leaf” to cover up debanking that’s being done for other reasons like risk appetite or reputational risk.
That report made some sensible recommendations:
- Banks should have to give a real reason before closing someone’s account.
- Reputation shouldn’t count against you at all when it comes to basic access to the financial system, other than when someone’s breaking the law.
- There should be a stripped-down “Basic Bank Account” for small businesses that are harder to serve, but not actually dangerous.
Since April this year, banks have had to give 90 days’ notice and a specific, detailed reason before they close an account. So one of the three were implemented.
But it’s pretty narrow as it only covers closure. It says nothing about the payment that gets blocked or the accounts that never get opened in the first place.
The two recommendations that would have covered the rest went nowhere. So this new inquiry is the third time Parliament has looked at the same core problem.
Hopefully, third time’s the charm.
What the government has actually promised
Earlier this year the Treasury said, on the record, that it wouldn’t expect FCA-licensed crypto firms to face account or transaction restrictions simply because of the sector they’re in.
On paper, that’s exactly the right position. The trouble is, what I see every week doesn’t match it. If anything, in some corners it’s getting worse.
That’s while the UK is actively building a full crypto regulatory regime, with the authorisation gateway opening this September and the whole thing mandatory by October 2027.
So what should actually happen now?
Here’s what I’d like to see come out of this inquiry.
- The FCA should say clearly and publicly that a firm’s registration can be treated as real, solid evidence of low risk. That doesn’t mean it should be considered as one small factor buried among twenty others. It should be the actual basis for decision.
- The rules that came in this April should be extended. Right now they cover closing an account. They should cover refusing to open one, and blocking a payment, and they should apply to licensed business customers, with a defined route to appeal.
- Reputation needs to come off the table entirely as grounds for refusing basic access.
- Someone needs to publish regular, public data on how many accounts and payments are being blocked, across every high-risk sector.
None of this means banks should stop protecting people from fraud or money laundering. It just means they need an honest, workable way to tell a legitimate business apart from the kind of activity these rules were actually built to catch.
The post Debanking is a High-Risk Problem Wearing a Crypto Face appeared first on The Fintech Times.
