Industry associations have repeatedly requested reviews of the Basel crypto rules for banks this year, particularly because the rules treat stablecoins as equivalent to the riskiest cryptocurrencies due to their issuance on permissionless blockchains. Following the meetings of the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision (BCBS) on 18 and 19 November, the BCBS said in a statement that the Committee agreed to “expedite a review of targeted elements of the standard.”
Earlier this week BCBS Chair Erik Thedéen confirmed to the Financial Times that the Committee was revisiting the Basel crypto rules, as Bloomberg reported last month.
“The focus back then was very much on the bitcoins of this world,” said Thedéen, referring to the initial rule development. “Now of course everyone is talking about stablecoins. Permissionless ledgers: are these as risky as we thought? Or is there an argument we can look at this in a different way? We need to start analysing. But we need to be fairly quick on it.” While the rules were formulated a few years ago, just last year the Basel Committee explicitly reaffirmed that permissionless blockchain usage would result in the riskiest classification.
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