Sweden’s central bank, the Riksbank, said on Friday it had appointed bitcoin skeptic and the current head of the national financial regulator Eric Theden as its new governor.
Theden, director general of Sweden’s Financial Supervisory Authority (FSA), replaces Stefan Ingves, who has led the bank since 2006.
Former CEO of Stockholm Stock Exchange set for six-year term
The former finance ministry official and CEO of the Stockholm Stock Exchange will assume his position on January 1 and attend the monetary policy meeting in February 2023. Thaden will complete a six-year term.
“His (Theiden) experience in managing financial authorities and organizations makes him well suited to become the new governor of the Riksbank,” the central bank’s General Council said in a statement.
Thaden’s appointment has been met with skepticism within the crypto industry.
Eric Wall, Stockholm-based crypto analyst and trader tweeted That the appointment of a new governor could not have happened at a “worse” time when markets were grappling with bad news. Wall had previously criticized Thaiden as “ignorant”.
Theden proposes banning bitcoin mining across Europe
As vice president of the European Securities and Markets Authority (EMSA), Theden called for a broad ban on “proof of work” cryptocurrency mining, saying the industry’s energy use was becoming a “national issue” in his homeland. .
“Bitcoin is now a national issue for Sweden because of the amount of renewable energy devoted to mining,” Thadden told the Financial Times earlier this year. “It would be an irony if the wind power generated on Sweden’s long coastline would be devoted to bitcoin mining.”
According to data from the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, bitcoin accounts for 0.53% of the world’s electricity.
Bitcoin is created through a system known as “proof-of-work” (PoW), a decentralized consensus mechanism that rewards supercomputers, or networks of miners, for validating transactions on the blockchain. Is.
However, some academics and economists have criticized the process, saying it consumes a lot of electricity while fueling climate change. Ethereum, the second largest crypto-asset that also uses PoW, is now transitioning to a more energy-friendly Proof-of-Stake (PoS).
In November last year, incoming Riksbank governor Eric Theden said that the energy consumption of bitcoin mining in Sweden increased “several hundred percent” from the five months to August 2021.
A few months later, speaking to the Financial Times, the Swedish regulator explained that it was not asking for a complete ban on crypto, but was “discussing how to move the industry to a more efficient technology”.
“The solution is to ban proof of work,” he said at the time.
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