The Bank of England head, Mark Carney, has said that he does not believe that the massive gains made by bitcoin pose a threat to the stability of global financial markets.

In a speech given to MPs on Wednesday, Carney acknowledged that recent price moves had been "significant" but said they posed more of an "equity-type risk". He went on to say that, at the moment, the Bank of England does not view bitcoin as a "financial stability issue," Reuters reports.

Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency by market cap, and the price of an individual coin recently peaked at $20,000. Carney, who is also chair of the Financial Stability Board at the G20, went on to say that he thought the concept of a cryptocurrency being issued by a central bank had some "some fundamental problems" unless there was some form of restriction or regulation placed on the total amount a person could hold.

Carney first commented on Blockchain technology at the start of 2017, when he said that distributed ledger technology (DLT) could potentially reshape the world of banking. The Bank of England recently announced that its real-time gross settlement system will be fully compatible with DLT.