I've been in the industry for 6 years now, the UK/FCA has been nothing but a nightmare to work with on crypto front.

I think there is more ignorance than malice, they simply have ruined UK businesses to date and favouring only the larger banks.

Anecdotally, I know a couple companies who moved all operations and market focus outside of UK yet their entire dev teams still reside in the UK and won't service UK customers.

To say UK is crypto friendly is simply untrue unfortunately.

From UK banks I still hear the 'yay blockchain, yay cbdc, yay NFTs' because they have very poor advisors (managment consultants I think is the polite term) who blagged a senior position and talk with such confidence yet have no idea about the real economics or technical merits of the technologies.

Santander and one other that I can't name are somewhat ahead of these others though and now progressing on the lightning band wagon.