The spectacular collapse of FTX Trading in the Bahamas could have never happened in Bermuda, the Premier told an international audience at the fourth annual International Tech Summit.

David Burt said: “They wouldn’t even have gotten past the front door in the Bermuda Monetary Authority.

“And that’s not to cast aspersions on any other place — that is just to say that we have a tried and tested regulatory regime, and the fact that we have a regulator that is stable, that is respected, will make sure that this industry can grow.”

Mr Burt was speaking during a “fireside chat” with Michael Casey, the chief content officer at CoinDesk, the media platform for the blockchain and digital asset community.

The Premier revealed that during early discussions about the need for legislation that was later passed as the Digital Asset Business Act 2018, there was some thought that a separate regulator should govern the digital asset space.

He added: “The push then was all about other jurisdictions who were doing that. People who are crypto, or are crypto OGs, remember countries like Malta that no one ever talks about.

“But at that point in time, and as a new government, you just feel the pressure to try to produce really quickly and try to make sure you get results.

“There were some persons who were saying that we should set up a separate regulator in order to regulate this, because if we left it to the BMA, the BMA may be slow, they may not do it, and we might lose out, and we might fall behind.”

But, Mr Burt said, a meeting with Jeremy Cox, then chief executive of the BMA, put a stop to that thinking.

He said: “Jeremy Cox came into my office and said ‘you will not be successful in this without the Bermuda Monetary Authority’ and I took the advice.

“He said, ‘Trust me, we will deliver,’ and a couple of months later I had a draft digital assets Bill. And four months later, we were able to table that in the legislature.”