BoE governor urges quick action on global stablecoin standards

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The governor of the Bank of England (BoE), Andrew Bailey, has bemoaned the slow pace of progress towards ​international standards for stablecoins, which he said are needed for “assured value.”

Speaking at an event by the Institute of International Finance last week, Bailey, who is also chair of the Financial Stability Board (FSB), reportedly voiced concerns that a lack of global coordination and unity on stablecoin standards affects the ability of the asset class to provide “assured value”—the confidence ​that a stablecoin can always be redeemed at ​face value.

“We do have to have international standards ​to underpin assured value,” Bailey said, as reported by Reuters on April 16. “I don’t ​think we can have a situation where we’ve got different ‌rules ⁠of engagement in different countries for that.”

The booming stablecoin space reached a total market cap of over $300 billion in December 2025, with some predicting it could hit the trillions by 2028. Meanwhile, on-chain activity exceeded $1 trillion in monthly transaction volume multiple times in 2025, with stablecoins processing $28 trillion in real economic volume over the course of the year, based on data from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, which also predicted this number could rise to $1.5 quadrillion by 2035, surpassing today’s entire cross-border payments market.

The exponential growth of the stablecoin sector over the past few years has naturally inspired greater focus on the regulation governing it, as well as a desire for uniform international standards.

The stablecoin provisions of the European Union’s Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulation came into force in June 2024—a full six months before the rest of MiCA came into effect—while the United States saw the GENIUS Act finally signed into law in July 2025, bringing with it the first federal regulatory framework for stablecoins in the country.

BoE Governor Bailey’s home country, the United Kingdom, has been comparatively slow to act, preferring to watch how legislation and regulation for stablecoin—and digital currency more broadly—pans out in other jurisdictions before settling on an approach.

Over the past year the U.K. has been edging closer to folding stablecoins into existing regulation, with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and BoE both having laid out their proposed approaches—the former will oversee the majority of the digital asset market, while the latter will take responsibility for ‘systemically important’ stablecoins—and the U.K. Treasury having published a draft Statutory Instrument (SI) last April that would give the regulators the necessary powers to implement their proposed rules.

The legislation has yet to be passed, and the House of Lords—the U.K.’s upper house of parliament—is currently undertaking an inquiry into stablecoin, one of the goals of which is to gather expert feedback on how stablecoins should be regulated, so the exact nature of the U.K.’s eventual framework is still open to change.

Nonetheless, the U.K.’s final regulatory regime for digital currencies, including stablecoins, is expected before the end of the year.

While the EU, U.S., and U.K. all have different approaches to stablecoin regulation, certain consistent features amongst them would encourage “assured value,” not least stablecoin issuers having to obtain licenses, maintain reserves equal to the value of the stablecoins in circulation—generally in ‘liquid’ assets—and transparency and disclosure requirements.

These common features are presumably what Bailey would like to see more of, and sooner rather than later, to prevent the undesirable situation in which firms seek out the jurisdiction with the least onerous rules and face problems operating across multiple divergent regimes.

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