22  The most affected sectors include some whose margins would be hardest hit, such as wholesale and retail trade and repair of motor vehicles, land transport, fishing and agriculture. The degree of financial vulnerability is also expected to rise by more than the average in some sectors in which the impact on sectoral margins is comparatively smaller, such as basic metals manufacturing, or publishing, cinema, television and radio. This is largely because some of the firms in such sectors were already hovering around the thresholds determining vulnerable status before the shock. 15  The results show that the greater adverse impact of these scenarios on the sector’s solvency would take the form of a worsening of the credit quality of loans to the private sector, leading to greater impairment losses on business in Spain and less capacity to generate net income from foreign business. Moreover, the simulated interest rate hike entails a slight reduction in the value of the bond holdings on banks’ balance sheets. At the same time, higher interest rates push up net interest income, by improving the net interest margin on loans to the private sector and making investing in debt securities more profitable, whereas the cost of deposits responds more moderately. Overall, the adverse scenario would have a negative impact of 1.8 pp on the aggregate CET1 ratio of Spanish banks as a whole, while the impact under the severe scenario would be as high as 3 pp.
Furthermore, the practical usability of crypto-assets relies to a great extent on identifiable intermediaries to act as “gateways” between the crypto-asset ecosystem on the one hand and the financial markets and the economy on the other. I have said before that we need to differentiate between “assets” such as bitcoin and the technology behind them, such as blockchain. Indeed, some of the technology is worth exploring 1/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  and could also be of interest to central banks. That said, our role is not to drive technological adoption by the industry and the general public, but to ensure that changing preferences can be satisfied in a secure way. While DLT is a necessary element of crypto-assets, it is not in itself their defining feature.3 The single distinguishing feature of crypto-assets such as bitcoin is the absence of an underlying claim, which makes it difficult for them to maintain price stability. Crucially, crypto-assets aren’t backed by any sovereign authority and, unlike financial instruments, they don’t give their holders ownership or contractual rights. Central banks provide confidence in money – as a store of value, unit of account and means of payment – by safeguarding the stability of the currency. By contrast with traditional currencies, bitcoin has been highly volatile over the past two years. Bitcoin’s average volatility in that period was close to 80 %, while many other crypto-assets showed even higher levels of volatility. This makes it impossible to use crypto-assets for anything but outright speculation.