“It is difficult to see a justification for the existence of unbacked crypto assets in the financial landscape,” he added, saying they are too volatile and inefficient to use for regular payments.  The FTX debacle will likely send investors toward decentralized exchanges, he said – adding that those exchanges will be harder to regulate and are liable to amplify financial shocks.

“Crypto assets deemed to have an excessive ecological footprint should . . . be banned,” he said, in a likely reference to platforms like Bitcoin that use an energy-intensive mechanism known as “proof-of-work” to validate transactions and secure their network.

The ECB;s skepticism about crypto is nothing new. Two staffers last week said bitcoin (BTC) is on the “road to irrelevance.”

https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/12/07/ban-energy-intensive-crypto-says-ecb-official/