The Financial Conduct Authority has published its final rules for cryptoasset firms and, with the Bank of England, a joint approach to supervising systemic stablecoin issuers. It has eased several of its earlier proposals, most notably halving the capital requirement for stablecoin issuance.

Among the commentators who responded, the reaction was broadly positive, though several were already looking past the headline to the standards firms will have to meet.

The FCA published the rules on 30 June, framing them as a move to cement the United Kingdom as a global hub for digital assets. Crypto firms operating in the UK, including trading platforms, intermediaries, custodians, stablecoin issuers and firms arranging staking, will need FCA authorisation and will have to meet prudential requirements, including minimum capital buffers and annual stress tests.

The most significant change from the earlier proposals is to stablecoin capital. The coefficient for stablecoin issuance has been cut to 1 per cent of the value of tokens issued, down from 2 per cent. Firms will be able to hold a cash surplus of up to 5 per cent within their backing asset pools, the requirement to forecast redemptions has been dropped, and limited intragroup custody is allowed subject to safeguards. The rules follow more than a year of consultation, including the FCA’s May 2025 proposals on prudential standards for stablecoin issuers, and they set the UK requirement at half the level the European Union imposes under its MiCA regime. They also land a year after the United States passed its GENIUS Act, its first federal stablecoin law, in July 2025. The joint approach with the Bank of England sets out how issuers move into joint supervision as they grow, and follows the Bank’s 22 June policy statement replacing individual holding limits with a temporary £40bn issuance guardrail.

Renuka Rawlins, director of policy and government relations at The Payments Association, called the capital decision the most important part of the package. “Most significant is the decision to halve the coefficient of the stablecoin issuance capital requirement from 2 per cent to 1 per cent,” she said. Her organisation had “consistently cautioned against importing overly conservative prudential frameworks that could stifle growth”, she added, describing the change as “a major victory for proportionality, ensuring robust risk management without placing an unworkable capital burden on larger issuers”.

Brett Hillis, a partner at the law firm Reed Smith, read the rules as one move among several. “The focus on simplifying the rules and leaving room for innovation is incredibly welcome,” he said. “Coupled with the Bank of England’s rethink on stablecoin holding limits and the FCA’s positive paper on tokenisation, this marks the UK staking ground as a major crypto hub.”

Not everyone treated the easing as the whole story. Deep Patel, partner and UK payments lead at the consultancy Capco, said the rules opened “a credible route into the UK payments ecosystem, but only for firms who are able to operate with bank-grade controls”. Firms, he said, “will need to meet high standards on backing assets, safeguarding, redemption and operational resilience”. He also placed the regime in a longer shift, towards “different forms of money sitting alongside each other, including bank deposits, tokenised deposits, regulated stablecoins and potentially a digital pound”.

Nick Jones, founder and chief executive of Zumo, framed authorisation as a turning point. “It’s an exciting time for the crypto industry in the UK, but also the end of an era: of offshore provision, of start-up style business processes, and of unregulated business models,” he said. Firms would soon be “regulated to the same stringent standards as UK financial services”, he added, including annual stress tests to prove they can withstand major market shocks.

For some, the more important question is what the rules are meant to enable. Chris Kronenthal, president of FreedomPay, argued that the industry has often fixed on the wrong problem. “A far greater source of financial friction is the chronic, slow-motion outage of antiquated backend systems, like cross-border settlement,” he said. The real potential of stablecoins, he added, “isn’t just novelty; it’s the opportunity to overhaul these decades-old infrastructures, making global commerce more transparent, efficient, and reliable”.

A note of caution came from Anthony Yeung, chief commercial officer at the digital asset protection firm CoinCover, who said stability was only part of what adoption requires. “As adoption accelerates, institutions and consumers also need confidence that digital assets can be securely accessed, managed and recovered when things go wrong,” he said, pointing to lost credentials, compromised wallets and failures in key management as risks that “can undermine confidence in the ecosystem”.

The authorisation gateway opens on 30 September 2026, with applications accepted until 28 February 2027 and a pre-application support service starting this month. The mandatory regime takes effect on 25 October 2027. The wider crypto framework, including the treatment of temporary issuance caps and wholesale settlement, is due to be settled before then.

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