Bank of England Promises ‘Temporary’ Stablecoin Caps – But Sets No End Date

The Bank of England will impose “ temporary ” limits on stablecoin holdings to protect credit availability, but has not specified when the caps will be lifted, Deputy Governor Sarah Breeden confirmed on ￰0￱ central bank plans limits of £10,000-£20,000 for individuals and £10 million for businesses on systemic stablecoins used for ￰1￱ stated, “ we would expect to remove the limits once we see that the transition no longer threatens the provision of finance to the real economy. ” However, the consultation paper arriving later this year provides no timeline or metrics defining when that threshold would be ￰2￱ approach contrasts with the U. S., where Congress passed the GENIUS Act in July , establishing federal stablecoin regulation without ownership ￰3￱ Duff Gordon, Vice President of International Policy at Coinbase, earlier told the Financial Times that “ imposing caps on stablecoins is bad for UK savers, bad for the City and bad for sterling ,” noting that no other major jurisdiction has deemed caps ￰4￱ Governor Sarah Breeden |) October 13, 2025 Breeden acknowledged coordination challenges, noting the UK government will appoint a Digital Markets Champion to coordinate private sector ￰5￱ government is also issuing a digital gilt instrument on a Sandbox platform to catalyze the adoption of ￰6￱ noted that the Bank’s new wholesale payments infrastructure, RT2, already supports settlement using tokenized central bank ￰7￱ functionality will be launched next year in the Synchronization Lab for testing real-world use cases before its production deployment.

Notably, this global adoption is growing as the worldwide stablecoin market has expanded to exceed $300 billion; yet, sterling-pegged tokens remain below $580,000, compared to $473 million in euro-linked stablecoins, according to DeFiLlama.