Australian Largest Bank Halts Rollout of Its Cryptocurrency Trading Service After UST and LUNA Crashed 

Australian Largest Bank Halts Roll Out of Its Cryptocurrency Trading Service After UST and LUNA Crashed 

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia has halted its in-house cryptocurrency trading program after Terra tokens suffered huge losses. 

Following the collapse of Terra (LUNA) and TerraUSD (UST) that crashed the prices of digital currencies, Australia’s largest bank, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), has halted the launch of its cryptocurrency service, which it planned to unveil later this year. 

According to a Guardian report today, CBA, which initially rolled out its cryptocurrency pilot program to selected customers earlier this year, paused the service as the prices of cryptocurrencies plummeted last week. 

The bank has not disclosed when it plans on resuming the pilot program before a date for a full rollout will be announced. 

CBA Awaiting Users’ Feedback and Crypto Regulation Before Taking Next Step

Matt Comyn, the CEO of CBA noted in a tech briefing earlier this week that it is still waiting for customers’ feedback as well as adequate regulation before the bank would proceed to the next stage of its cryptocurrency trading program. 

“As events of the last week have reinforced, it is a very volatile sector that remains an enormous amount of interest. But alongside that volatility and awareness and I guess the scale, certainly globally, you can see there is a lot of interest from regulators and people thinking about the best way to regulate that,” Comyn added. 

At the moment, Australia’s Federal Treasury is still receiving input on the best way to regulate the nation’s cryptocurrency space until May 27. 

“Our intention still, at this stage, is to restart the pilot, but there are still a couple of things that we want to work through on a regulatory front to make sure that that is most appropriate,” Commonwealth Bank CEO said. 

Terra Tokens’ Crash Plunges Other Cryptos

The development comes after Terra’s stablecoin UST lost its peg to the dollar, which proceeded to affect LUNA and the entire cryptocurrency market. 

Although the Commonwealth Bank of Australia did not include UST and LUNA in the list of cryptocurrencies it planned to offer to its customers, the ten digital currencies listed also suffered huge losses over the past week. 

While LUNA dipped to a low of $0.00000009, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum were not spared as they also plunged to a low of $27,000 and $1,824, respectively. 

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