- A bill going before the House of Lords in September would give the Bank of England a legal duty to support innovation in stablecoins, according to Decrypt.
- Financial stability stays the Bank’s primary objective. The new duty sits underneath it.
- No stablecoin issuer has been authorised in the UK, and none of this changes what a holder can do today.
A legal duty sounds like a decision. It usually isn’t. The reported change to the Bank of England’s remit would oblige it to think about stablecoin innovation while it writes the rules, which is a different thing from letting anyone issue one.
Nothing about this changes what you can hold or spend right now. If you use a dollar or euro stablecoin through an app today, you’re using a product issued outside the UK regime, and that stays true after the bill passes. What it does change is the temperature of the rules being written behind the scenes. Those rules will decide whether a British bank or fintech can issue a pound-pegged at all, and whether the caps the Bank floated on how many you can hold survive.
What a statutory duty actually does
A stablecoin is a crypto token designed to hold a fixed value, usually one dollar or one pound, by keeping matching reserves in cash and short-term government debt. The Bank of England’s interest is narrow and specific: if one of these things gets big enough to be used for everyday payments, a run on it becomes a payments problem rather than a crypto problem.
That’s why the Bank has been the cautious voice in this debate. Handing it a duty to foster innovation doesn’t remove the caution. A statutory objective of this kind obliges a regulator to have regard to something when it makes decisions, and to be able to show it did. It does not oblige the regulator to say yes to anything, and where the new duty conflicts with financial stability, financial stability wins by construction.
Decrypt reports the duty is written into a bill due before the Lords in September. We haven’t seen the bill text or a statement from the Bank or the Treasury, and the detail matters here more than usual: the difference between “must facilitate” and “must have regard to” is the difference between a shove and a nudge.
We’ve seen this before, in 2023
The UK already ran this experiment. The Financial Services and Markets Act 2023 gave both the FCA and the Prudential Regulation Authority a secondary objective on international competitiveness and growth, sitting below their primary objectives in exactly the way the stablecoin duty is described as sitting below financial stability.
What followed was not a wave of approvals. It was reporting. Both regulators now publish accounts of how they’ve had regard to the objective, and the industry’s complaint since has largely been that the pace didn’t change much. Crypto firms in particular spent the following two years queuing for registration under the money laundering rules, with a well-documented rejection rate.
That’s the realistic template for what a stablecoin duty produces: a Bank that has to explain itself more, and a slightly stronger hand for anyone arguing a proposed rule is disproportionate. It is not a green light.
Where the UK regime actually stands
The Bank consulted last year on a regime for systemic sterling stablecoins, the ones large enough to matter for payments, and floated holding limits per person and per business. That consultation drew heavy pushback from the industry. The FCA has been running its own consultation on issuance and custody for the non-systemic end. Neither regime is finished, and a bill still in the Lords in September is not a rulebook.
Meanwhile the products keep arriving from elsewhere. Revolut has just switched on a euro-pegged token, EURR, for selected customers in Denmark, Poland and Portugal, with reserves held by a Luxembourg subsidiary of Stripe. In South Korea, Mirae Asset has set out plans for a digital asset arm spanning crypto, stablecoins and assets. Both are being built under regimes that reached the finishing line before the UK’s did.
The contrast that gets cited most often is the United States, where a federal stablecoin law was passed and the Treasury moved to implementation. We wrote about what that process looked like in our coverage of the Treasury’s GENIUS Act work. The UK is arriving at the same subject from the opposite direction: a central bank being asked, by statute, to be less of a brake.
What to watch
The wording, when the bill reaches the Lords. Whether the duty is drafted as a hard obligation or a matter to have regard to will tell you how much it’s worth, and that’s a single clause anyone can read.
Then the holding limits. The Bank’s proposed caps are the most concrete thing on the table, and if the new duty has any practical force, that’s the first place it should show up. Nothing about a UK-authorised sterling stablecoin is imminent either way, and anyone selling you a date should be asked where they got it.
We haven’t been able to find primary documentation for this story: no bill text, no Bank of England or Treasury statement, and no on-the-record quote from either. Treat the specifics as Decrypt’s reporting until the bill is published.