Ban ads for cryptocurrencies at stations and on buses, TfL urged

Transport for London (TfL) has been urged to ban adverts for unregulated financial products after it ran a three-week poster campaign for a crypto token funded by an anonymous group.

Posters for Floki, a so-called meme coin named after a dog owned by Elon Musk, appeared on buses and in Underground stations across London last month.

Since the invention of bitcoin in 2009, the software used to make crypto coins has become widely available, leading to hundreds of new digital tokens, with many based on jokes and internet memes, such as Dogecoin. But digital tokens remain unregulated in the UK and many other countries, and some have been used as scams.

At the end of October a token based on the Netflix show Squid Game gained worldwide publicity, prompting a 310,000% rise in value to $2,856 in a single day. But the value collapsed within hours and the anonymous developers behind the Squid token have disappeared, apparently with a profit of at least $2m.

In September the chair of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), Charles Randell, called for ministers to give it powers to regulate cryptoassets after Kim Kardashian West was paid to advertise Ethereum Max, a token that had been created a month earlier by unknown developers.