The U.S. Treasury building in Washington, D.C., with the Washington Monument in the background.

The U.S. and Britain Want Stablecoins to Cross the Atlantic. The Passport Is Still Missing

By Isaac • July 14, 2026 5:14 pm • Comments

Washington and London have agreed on what a trustworthy stablecoin should look like. They still have not agreed that a coin approved on one side of the Atlantic can simply operate on the other.

That gap is the most important part of the new U.S.-UK plan for digital finance.

The two governments want stablecoins to move through cross-border payments, settlement systems and capital markets with less friction. They also want tokenized securities to develop under compatible rules.

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But the document released Tuesday is a roadmap, not a passport.

The U.S. Treasury Department said the Transatlantic Taskforce for Markets of the Future had delivered recommendations covering digital assets, tokenized finance, securities regulation and cross-border capital raising.

The taskforce was created in September 2025 during President Trump’s state visit to Britain. Its stated goal was to make the world’s two largest financial centers work together more closely as markets move on-chain.

U.S. Treasury and HM Treasury co-chaired the effort, with financial regulators from both countries participating. The taskforce reported through the existing U.S.-UK Financial Regulatory Working Group.

The package is meant to reduce unnecessary friction, update supervisory cooperation and give tokenized financial activity a clearer path between New York and London. It also favors open, market-based standards over closed national systems.

Treasury also described the work as a channel for continued industry engagement. That signals an opening round rather than a completed rulebook.

The political direction is real. So are the limits.

The joint stablecoin statement lays out a serious common baseline. Payment stablecoins should be backed at least one-for-one with high-quality liquid assets.

Reserves should be segregated, redemption rights should be clear and holders should have priority claims on those reserves if an issuer fails.

The statement also calls for fair, risk-based access to banking and financial markets. That matters because an issuer can meet the letter of a stablecoin law and still struggle to obtain bank accounts, custody, payment rails or market access.

The two governments also warned against excessive local ring-fencing. Requiring an issuer to duplicate its entire reserve pool inside every jurisdiction could make a global product safer in theory but fragmented and expensive in practice.

Those are meaningful principles. None of them, by itself, authorizes a British stablecoin in the United States or an American stablecoin in Britain.

The operative language says the governments intend to explore a clear pathway for stablecoins from each country to access the other’s market.

Explore is doing a lot of work there.

A true passport would require an agreed mechanism. Regulators would need to decide which approvals are recognized, which supervisor takes the lead, how reserves are verified across borders and what happens when an issuer serves customers in both markets.

They would also need rules for redemptions, insolvency, sanctions, disclosures and enforcement that work when the issuer, reserve assets, banks and users are spread across two legal systems.

The statement does not settle those questions. It explicitly says the shared principles do not predetermine either country’s ongoing regulatory process.

For now, an issuer still has to treat the United States and Britain as separate gates.

The broader taskforce recommendations show where the governments want to go next. The first five cover digital assets, while the remaining five focus on capital markets.

One recommendation creates a private-sector-led testing group for cross-border tokenization. That work is supposed to run for one year and identify the practical barriers that appear when an asset is issued, traded and settled across the two markets.

Another asks the Bank of England, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Financial Conduct Authority and Securities and Exchange Commission to seek common approaches to tokenized assets and settlement finality.

The regulators are expected to turn those common approaches into timely guidance that businesses can use when building cross-border products. The roadmap does not set a deadline for that guidance.

It also raises a bigger institutional question: whether stablecoins and tokenized money-market funds can eventually qualify as margin collateral at central counterparties.

The roadmap says stablecoins, tokenized bank deposits and other digital forms of money should be able to coexist. It does not select one model as the winner.

It also commits both governments to seek a targeted review of the Basel Committee’s prudential treatment of crypto assets. The stated aim is a framework that is technology-neutral, evidence-based and able to survive further market change.

That would take stablecoins far beyond retail payments or crypto trading. Central counterparties sit in the middle of major financial markets and manage the collateral that protects trades when one party fails.

Allowing tokenized money to serve there would require regulators to trust its liquidity, legal finality and operational resilience under stress. The recommendation is an invitation to study that possibility, not permission to use the assets today.

The same caution applies to the rest of the package.

CoinDesk described the plan as a 10-point roadmap spanning tokenized finance and stablecoins. It also noted that the recommendations create no new rules on their own; the actual work now moves to the regulators.

No issuer receives a new license from Tuesday’s announcement. No bank can begin posting stablecoins as clearinghouse collateral solely because the taskforce recommended that regulators study it.

That distinction keeps the announcement from being mistaken for immediate deregulation. It also gives the market a useful checklist for judging whether the political promise turns into operational change.

The potential payoff is substantial if regulators close that implementation gap. Tokenized assets need legal finality, dependable collateral treatment and permission to enter both markets before the roadmap changes how firms operate.

A stablecoin issuer that can meet one rigorous reserve standard and gain a workable route into both markets would avoid building two disconnected products. Banks and asset managers could move tokenized cash and securities between New York and London without reinventing settlement at every border.

That could deepen liquidity, reduce trapped collateral and make round-the-clock settlement more practical.

It could also fail if the two countries agree on slogans but diverge on supervision. A one-for-one reserve rule is only the beginning.

The hard questions concern what counts as a reserve, where it sits, who audits it, how quickly holders are paid and which regulator acts first when something breaks.

The next milestones will be concrete ones: the launch of the testing group, regulator proposals on tokenized collateral, movement on the Basel treatment of crypto assets and an actual market-access framework for stablecoins.

Until then, the United States and Britain have something valuable but incomplete.

They have agreed on the destination. The stablecoin passport still has to be written.

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