Erik Thedéen, chair of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS), said the group is revisiting its Basel crypto rules. This development was reported last month. Industry associations have repeatedly pressed for reviews this year, arguing that the rules treat stablecoins as equivalent to the riskiest cryptocurrencies because they are issued on permissionless blockchains. “The focus back then was very much on the bitcoins of this world,” Thedéen said, referring to the initial rule development.
“Now of course everyone is talking about stablecoins,” Thedéen said. “Permissionless ledgers: are these as risky as we thought?”
Just last year, the Basel Committee explicitly reaffirmed that permissionless blockchain usage would result in the riskiest classification, even though the rules were formulated a few years ago. The real challenge is that no major jurisdiction has committed to adopting this punitive treatment of stablecoins. The United States has rejected the risk weighting as unrealistic, and the UK’s public stance is closer to a wait-and-see approach, similar to Singapore’s. Other active stablecoin jurisdictions, such as the European Union and Hong Kong, are not adopting the stablecoins rules, while complying with many of the other crypto rules.
Leave a Reply