Regulation
Basel Crypto Rules Get Minor Updates. No Blockchain Changes Without Permission – Ledger Insights
Today the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision published Updates to cryptocurrency rules for bank compliance. It also released the final disclosure framework. The rule changes appear relatively minor, compared to previous plansIn the latest consultation, the Committee threatened to treat traditional digital securities as public blockchains as having the same risk as cryptocurrencies. This would prevent banks from participating in tokenization initiatives on public blockchains because they would be prohibitively expensive. However, the changes do not mention permissionless blockchains at all, which is good news for banks’ tokenization efforts.
Similarly, two of the biggest proposed changes to stablecoins were removed from the final amendments. The consultation suggested that all stablecoin reserves should be in a remote bankruptcy vehicle. This is problematic for stablecoin reserves held in bank accounts, and the European MiCA regulations require a high percentage of reserves to be held in banks. The final Basel rules provide an exception for bank balances.
The Basel Committee also considered banning the use of securities financing transactions such as repos and reverse repos in stablecoin reserves. While the Basel announcement states that reverse repos are allowed subject to limitations, it is not very clear and appears to be at the discretion of national regulators.
In the meantime, the Committee has previously postponed the implementation of the rules to January 2026.
This is breaking news, so we plan to update this article extensively.