Costing £40bn a year until 2030, Labour has decided its colossal net zero plan is worth the risk

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4 months ago

December 13, 2024

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There’s a reason previous governments baulked at the net zero challenge – it’s absolutely colossal, something Labour’s new Clean Power 2030 plan lays bare.

Offshore wind generating capacity, which has taken 20 years to reach 14.8GW, must more than triple to about 50GW within just six years.

The plan calls for a tripling of solar generation too, and a doubling supply from onshore wind turbines.

And to get all that clean, locally produced power to where it is actually needed will require an overhaul of the National Grid not seen since the current system was planned in the 1950s.

The government projects that to deliver all that infrastructure will require investment of £40bn a year until 2030.

Nearly all of that will come from the private sector – it hopes – knowing the Treasury certainly will not have any spare money to pay for it.

And all that is backed up by a promise that the project will lower consumer bills.

It’s a massive challenge and given the UK’s recent history of delivering large infrastructure projects – high-speed rail line anyone? – a major political gamble.

But Labour has decided it is worth the risk.

If they pull it off, most analysts agree that locally generated renewable power will reduce the wholesale price of electricity – currently dictated by the international gas market.

This, in turn, will protect customers from price shocks and lower bills. Definitely a vote winner.

The other main attraction is to “get Britain building,” creating new, skilled jobs with many of them in parts of the country where they are needed most.

Coupled with that, many countries are pursuing similar goals and UK companies and workers stand to benefit by exporting their knowledge and skills.

And not forgetting the fact this government, like its predecessors, is legally required to do all this under the terms of the Climate Change Act as well as fulfilling the commitment made when we signed the global carbon-cutting Paris Agreement.

But none of that makes it any less difficult.

Take the grid for example.

Right now, as new renewable projects like large offshore windfarms are connected to our old, fossil fuel orientated national grid, on really windy days, there is already more electricity than the system can handle.

Increasingly big wind farms out to sea and a long way from consumers are having to be paid not to generate electricity, and gas-fired power stations closer to customers have to be paid to come online instead.

The bill for these “grid constraints” is already about £2bn a year.

Re-wiring the grid will solve that problem – benefitting everyone.

But imagine there’s a delay – thanks to local opposition to new pylons, or a labour shortage, or poorly managed construction – and the grid doesn’t get upgraded in step with generating capacity.

The constraint costs are projected to hit £8bn a year – that’s £80 per household – by the late 2020s.

That would make very bad headlines for a government that promised to lower bills. And the grid is just one of the pieces of the zero-carbon electricity puzzle.

Everything – from reforming the retail market for energy, to smart metering, EV charging, connecting heat pumps and new technologies that can store excess electricity for when the wind isn’t blowing – will all have to happen in parallel, at pace, to ensure the project delivers the benefits promised.

The Clean Power plan will be a genuine test of whether Britain can “get building again”, but also of Keir Starmer’s political stomach when it hits the inevitable bumps along the way.

Politics

DeFi security and compliance must be improved to attract institutions

Published

3 hours ago

April 9, 2025

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DeFi security and compliance must be improved to attract institutions

Opinion by: Sergej Kunz, co-founder of 1inch

Institutional players have been closely watching decentralized finance’s growth. Creating secure and compliant DeFi platforms is the only solution to build trust and attract more institutions.

Clear waters attract big ships

Over the past four years, institutional DeFi adoption has gone from 10% of hedge funds to 47%, and is projected to rise to 65% in 2025. Goldman Sachs is reaching their arms to DeFi for bond issuance and yield farming.

Early adopters are already positioning themselves in onchain finance, including Visa, which has processed over $1 billion in crypto transactions since 2021 and is now testing cross-border payments. In the next two years, institutional adoption will speed up. A compliant regulatory framework that maintains DeFi’s core benefits is necessary for institutional adoption to engage confidently.

DeFi’s institutional trilemma

It is no secret that many DeFi security exploits happen every year. The recent Bybit hack reported a $1.4 billion loss. The breach occurred through a transfer process that was vulnerable to attack. Attacks like these raise concerns about multisignature wallets and blind signing. This happens when users approve transactions without full details, rendering blind signing a significant risk. This case calls for stronger security measures and improvements in user experience.

The threats of theft due to vulnerabilities in smart contracts or mistakes by validators make institutional investors hesitate when depositing large amounts of money into institutional staking pools. Institutions are also at risk of noncompliance due to a lack of clear regulatory frameworks, creating hesitation to enter the space.

The user interface in DeFi is often designed for users with technical expertise. Institutional investors require user-friendly experiences that make DeFi staking possible without relying on third-party intermediaries.

Build it right, and they will come

Institutional interest in bringing traditional assets onchain is enormous, with the tokenized asset market estimated to reach $16 trillion by 2030. To confidently participate in DeFi, institutions need verifiable counterparties that are compliant with regulatory requirements. The entry of traditional institutional players into DeFi has led some privacy advocates to point out that it can counter the essence of decentralization, which forms the bedrock of the ecosystem.

Recent: Securitize to bring BUIDL tokenized fund to DeFi with RedStone price feeds

Institutions must be able to trust DeFi platforms to maintain compliance standards while providing a safe and seamless user interface. A balanced approach is key. DeFi’s permissionless nature can be achieved while maintaining compliance through identity profiles, allowing secure transactions. Similarly, transaction screening tools facilitate real-time monitoring and risk assessment.

Blockchain analytics tools help institutions to maintain compliance with Anti-Money Laundering regulations and prevent interaction with blacklisted wallets. Integrating these tools can help detect and prevent illicit activity, making DeFi safer for institutional engagement.

Intent-based architecture can improve security

The relationship between intent-based architecture and security is evident; the very design is built to reduce risks, creating a more reliable user experience. This protects the user against MEV exploits, a common issue of automated bots scanning for large profitable trades that can be exploited. Intent-based architecture also helps implement compliance frameworks. For instance, restricting order submissions to clean wallets and allowing resolvers to settle only the acceptable orders.

It’s well understood that in traditional DeFi transactions, users rely often on intermediaries like liquidity providers to execute trades or manage funds. This leads to counterparty risk, unauthorized execution and settlement failure. The intent-based architecture supports a trustless settlement that ensures users commit only when all conditions are met, reducing risk and removing blind trust from the picture.

DeFi platforms must simplify interactions and UX for institutional investors. This system bridges the gap between. Through executing offchain while ensuring security, the intent-based architecture makes DeFi safer and more efficient. However, one of the challenges to this includes integrating offchain order matching while maintaining onchain transparency.

Late adopters of DeFi will struggle to keep up

For the early adopters of DeFi, there is a competitive advantage in liquidity access and yield advantages, whereas late adopters will face more regulatory scrutiny and entry barriers. By 2026, the institutional players that have failed to adopt DeFi may struggle to keep up. This is seen in the examples of early adopters like JPMorgan and Citi’s early tokenization projects. TradFi leaders like them are already gearing up for onchain finance.

The way forward

Regulatory bodies, supervisory agencies and policy leaders must provide clear, standardized guidelines to facilitate broader institutional participation. Uniform protocols underpinning wider institutional involvement are underway. DeFi platforms must be prepared beforehand to provide all the necessary pillars of compliance and security to institutional players who want to embrace mainstream adoption. Executing this shall require combined efforts from regulators, developers and institutions.

Opinion by: Sergej Kunz, co-founder of 1inch.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Politics

Kalshi accepts Bitcoin deposits in bid to woo crypto-native users

Published

4 hours ago

April 9, 2025

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Kalshi accepts Bitcoin deposits in bid to woo crypto-native users

Prediction marketplace Kalshi has started taking Bitcoin (BTC) deposits in a bid to onboard more crypto-native users.

The company that lets users bet on events ranging from election outcomes to Rotten Tomatoes film ratings has seen a strong uptake among crypto traders, Kalshi told Cointelegraph on April 9. For instance, event contracts for betting on Bitcoin’s hour-by-hour price changes have seen $143 million in trading volume to date, a spokesperson said.

Kalshi is a derivatives exchange regulated by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). As of April 9, it listed some 50 crypto-related event contracts, including markets for betting on coins’ 2025 highs and lows, as well as on headlines such as US President Donald Trump’s proposed National Bitcoin Reserve.

The platform started accepting crypto payments in October when it enabled stablecoin USD Coin (USDC) deposits.

Kalshi relies on ZeroHash — a crypto payments infrastructure provider — for off-ramping BTC and USDC and converting the deposits to US dollars. The exchange accepts BTC deposits only from the Bitcoin network.

More accurate than polls

Launched in 2021, Kalshi rose to prominence ahead of the US’s November elections.

It became a top venue for trading on 2024 political events after winning a lawsuit against the CFTC, which tried to block Kalshi from listing contracts tied to elections.

The regulator argued that political prediction markets threaten the integrity of elections, but industry analysts say they often capture public sentiment more accurately than polls.

For instance, prediction markets, including Kalshi, accurately predicted Trump’s presidential election win even as polls indicated a tossup.

“Event contract markets are a valuable public good for which there is no evidence of significant manipulation or widespread use for any nefarious purposes that the Commission alleges,” Harry Crane, a statistics professor at Rutgers University, said in an August comment letter filed with the CFTC.

As of April 9, Kalshi traders peg the odds of the US entering a recession at 68%, according to its website.

In March, Kalshi partnered with Robinhood to bring prediction markets to the popular online brokerage platform. Robinhood’s stock rose some 8% on the news.

Kalshi competes with Polymarket, a Web3-based prediction platform. Polymarket processed more than $3 billion in trading volumes tied to the US presidential election despite being off-limits for US traders.

Magazine: Bitcoin heading to $70K soon? Crypto baller funds SpaceX flight: Hodler’s Digest, March 30 – April 5

Politics

No crypto project has registered with the SEC and ‘lived to tell the tale’ — House committee hearing

Published

5 hours ago

April 9, 2025

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No crypto project has registered with the SEC and ‘lived to tell the tale’ — House committee hearing

United States securities laws are not flexible enough to account for digital assets, as evidenced by the parade of crypto-native companies that have tried and failed to get into the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) good graces, Rodrigo Seira, special counsel to Cooley LLP, told a House Committee hearing on April 9.

The hearing, titled American Innovation and the Future of Digital Assets Aligning the U.S. Securities Laws for the Digital Age, featured Seira, WilmerHale partner Tiffany J. Smith, Polygon chief legal officer Jake Werrett and Alexandra Thorn, a senior director at the Center for American Progress.

“It is clear that the current securities regulatory framework is not a viable option to regulate crypto. It fails to achieve its stated policy goals,” Seira said in his opening remarks. “[T]he idea that crypto projects can come in and register with the SEC is demonstrably false.”

Seira acknowledged that crypto promoters who raise capital for a new enterprise should be subject to federal securities laws.

“In practice, however, virtually no crypto projects have successfully registered their tokens under federal securities laws and lived to tell the tale,” he said, adding:

Projects that tried to comply with [the] SEC’s current regulatory requirements expended significant resources and effort only to fail or survive in a state of regulatory uncertainty. Moreover, registration is not a simple one-time process. Registering a token in the same manner as a stock triggers an obligation to operate as a publicly reporting company […].”

Righting the ship

In introducing the witnesses, Representative Bryan Steil, who heads the Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Artificial Intelligence, acknowledged regulatory roadblocks, which he said were put in place by the previous administration.

Under President Donald Trump, lawmakers are attempting to right the ship by passing sensible legislation, said Steil.

One of the first steps occurred last week when the House Financial Services Committee advanced the STABLE Act, which is designed to regulate payment stablecoins tied to the US dollar and other fiat currencies.

A month earlier, the Senate Banking Committee advanced the GENIUS Act, which aims to regulate stablecoin issuers by establishing reserve requirements and requiring full compliance with Anti-Money Laundering laws.

The next step is “advancing the second half of this agenda: comprehensive digital asset market structure legislation,” said Steil.

Representative Ro Khanna told a digital asset conference last month that a market structure bill will cross the finish line this year.

The purpose of such legislation is to establish a clear regulatory framework for digital assets, including their legal categories and the enforcement jurisdiction of agencies such as the SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Magazine: Unstablecoins: Depegging, bank runs and other risks loom