07-17-2026 
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The United States and United Kingdom governments have jointly published a set of recommendations aimed at deepening cross-border financial activity between the two nations, including measures to support tokenized assets and stablecoins, as well as progressing shared accounting and auditing standards.
- U.S. and U.K. to enhance collaboration in digital financial sectors
- Tokenized assets to transform markets and investment opportunities
- Governments prioritize regulatory clarity for stablecoins
- Is the U.K. following the U.S.’s digital currency playbook?
On July 14, the U.S Department of the Treasury and U.K.’s HM Treasury released a joint statement and list of recommendations for collaboration on capital markets and digital assets, alongside a separate joint statement on stablecoins, as part of their Transatlantic Taskforce for the Markets of the Future (TTMF).
The TTMF was established in September 2025 by the U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, and the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, as part of President Donald Trump’s State Visit to the U.K. the same month. The taskforce aimed to develop recommendations to advance U.K.-U.S. financial services collaboration, with a focus on digital assets and capital markets.
“The United States and the UK should leverage their positions as leading global financial centres to actively shape the development of digital asset markets and next-generation financial infrastructure,” read the joint statement. “The TTMF has identified targeted steps that can improve connectivity, enable more efficient and transparent markets, and inform potential alignment of regulatory frameworks.”
Among the key recommendations were a number focused on boosting the tokenization sector in both countries.
Tokenized assets
A recent report valued the real-world asset (RWA) tokenization market at $60 billion across 7,000 products, while Citi Group (NASDAQ: C) predicted it would reach $5.5 trillion by 2030. In recent months, interest in the space reached new heights, after on-chain equity volumes surged 145% to $3.86 billion in the wake of the June 2026 SpaceX IPO.
To support and benefit from this growing space, the TTMF called for several measures. Firstly, engaging a private-sector-led group focused on industry experimentation and testing of cross-border use cases for tokenized assets, and on sharing best practices.
“The engagement will be established on a one-year basis; UK and US officials will engage with industry on the optimal structure,” read the joint statement. “The group may seek to address questions related to fostering greater adoption of digital and tokenised assets in transatlantic markets, including consideration of regulatory clarity needed to enable specific use cases and technical standards to support development of the broader tokenised finance ecosystem.”
Regulatory clarity was clearly a concern for the taskforce, as another of its main recommendations involved U.S. and U.K. authorities, including the Bank of England (BoE), the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), seeking to identify common approaches to the regulatory treatment of tokenized assets.
According to the statement, this should cover areas such as settlement finality of tokenized securities transactions and the potential eligibility and use of stablecoins and tokenized money market funds as margin collateral at central counterparties.
Finally, the taskforce recommended that the U.S. and the U.K. work together to support financial innovation through robust policy frameworks for digital financial services, in which “stablecoins, tokenised deposits, and other forms of digital money can coexist as part of a multi-money ecosystem to deliver benefits for consumers and businesses.”
In addition to several mentions alongside tokenized assets in the taskforce’s main recommendation list, stablecoins received special attention in a separate joint statement from the two countries’ Treasuries.
Stablecoins
In terms of regulating the digital asset space, lawmakers and authorities worldwide have tended to prioritize stablecoins—a sector that, as of July, has a market cap of $314 billion—often citing their broader utility and concerns about heightened risk to traditional financial systems.
Tuesday’s joint U.S.-U.K. statement on stablecoins aimed to promote convergence between their two regimes—such as they are—and to support dynamic cross-border stablecoin activity.“Both governments recognize that well-regulated stablecoins have the potential to promote efficiency and competition in our financial systems, modernize financial market infrastructure, and improve cross-border payments and transactions,” read the statement. “Both governments also recognize the importance of promoting competition and innovation, protecting financial stability, safeguarding consumers, and maintaining public confidence in money, in a financial ecosystem that includes multiple forms of money.”
To this end, the countries affirmed 10 views on the asset class, based on the shared assumption that “stablecoins are an important vehicle for innovation in digital money.”
The notable affirmations included that stablecoins held out as money should be fully backed, on at least a one-to-one basis, by high-quality, liquid assets; that reserve, liquidity, and other prudential requirements for stablecoins should seek to mitigate risks and avoid unnecessary fragmentation, through setting high standards for the custody, segregation, and protection of stablecoin reserves; and that domestic regulatory and supervisory regimes should emphasize the importance of formal mechanisms to enable cross-border stablecoin activity.
The pair also committed to stimulating competition and innovation “through policies that facilitate the coexistence and circulation of different forms of digital money solutions,” and to regulatory approaches that “promote innovation and resilience, without imposing burdensome constraints that undermine commercial viability, create barriers to entry, or hinder competition.”
UK following in US footsteps
An aversion to onerous regulations, particularly for stablecoins, is very much singing from the Trump 2.0 playbook, with the U.S. president— possibly the world’s most famous crypto-advocate—having done everything in his power, since taking office for his second term last January, to realize his promise of making the U.S. the “crypto capital of the world.”
This included reshaping the regulatory landscape in the country into a more pro-innovation environment, creating a Bitcoin reserve, pardoning a host of crypto-criminals, and pushing through generally favorable stablecoin regulation in the form of the GENIUS Act.
The U.K. has watched all this from the sidelines, slowly progressing its digital asset framework— due next October—while continuing to affirm a commitment, adopted by successive governments going back to 2022, to making the U.K. a digital asset hub.
The July 14 publication of the TTMF recommendations, alongside the joint statement from the two countries’ respective Treasury Departments, appears to reaffirm this commitment to supporting the space, rather than curtailing it.
This was underscored by U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent, who said: “The Transatlantic Taskforce for Markets of the Future reflects the strength and depth of U.S. and UK markets and our shared commitment to fostering economic growth and advancing global standards that reward innovation and competition.”
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