The Treasury also makes warm, gurgling noises about the potential of decentralised finance, although the truncation “de-fi” is deemed either too spicy, or vulgar, to appear. 

De-fi uses distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), in other words, blockchain, in combination with smart contracts, to create new kinds of financial instruments which collateralise an underlying cryptocurrency or coin. 

These are turning out to have some interesting properties, such as liquidity discovery. The Treasury notes the spectacular explosion of interest in de-fi, with a tenfold increase in little more than 18 months. 

Crypto finance is now emerging as a parallel to the ever-more-pious capital markets, only one with no dominant market players, and with nobody in charge. 

Whitehall believes that “substantial benefits” could be delivered here by adopting some of these innovations, and so it’s encouraging experiments find out more. A Financial Market Infrastructure Sandbox will be up and running next year.

So far so good, and at least the Treasury appears more enlightened than the taxman, who wants to know about every accumulation of value in a crypto wallet, even if that happens hundreds of times a second, which is the case with some of the new de-fi instruments.

“Anyone who does serious crypto in the EU was already considering moving. Sunak wants them to come to the UK; it’s a smart move,” one successful de-fi investor tells me.

Importantly, the Treasury-blessed sandbox may help shed light on the very puzzle at the core of crypto-finance, which has yet to be resolved. It is this: is de-fi proving useful because it’s decentralised and distributed, using blockchain and contracts – or simply because it’s money as software, and the institutional players have been slow to implement these ideas?

If the answer is the latter, then today’s established and regulated actors can swoop in and adopt the new tools, and capture the benefits.

Yet crypto-finance appeals to its enthusiasts precisely because it is completely decentralised, and beyond the reach of authority. They’re particularly keen that it stays out of the hands of incontinent central bankers, who have become addicted to printing money.

What, they ask, would be the point of a cryptocurrency that a central bank could print on demand? For them, a regulated crypto world makes no more sense than being a little bit pregnant.

Bridging the two universes has already had one very high-profile casualty: Mark Zuckerberg. Less than three years ago, Facebook announced an ambitious cryptocurrency initiative, Libra, hoping to bring respectability to the new Wild West. 

Visa and Mastercard were on board, and a complex governance structure was devised. But the more that Facebook sought to please the US regulators, the more it found itself shunned by the crypto community who would use and invest in it. 

Meta finally shelved the plans in January. So it’s only really with regulatory experiments like the Sandbox that we can begin to unravel this conundrum. 

For once, Whitehall has actually woken up to the fact the UK has left the EU, allowing, perhaps, British pragmatism to forge a path for others to follow.