The Bank of England rewrote its sterling stablecoin rulebook this week, and the direction of the revision is the story: it scrapped individual holding caps entirely and replaced them with a temporary £40 billion issuance limit per coin [1][2]. The change followed industry pushback on the earlier, stricter proposal [1] — a notable instance of one of the more conservative major central banks easing toward private digital money rather than tightening.
The shift reframes the UK's approach from rationing demand — how much any one person could hold — to bounding supply — how much any one issuer can mint — while keeping systemic oversight in place [2]. The Bank has signaled the £40 billion figure is provisional and will be refined with further guidance [2].
The counter-tension is in the same package. One read of the draft flagged a 30% reserve requirement on stablecoins that could push issuers offshore [3], and the rules arrived amid domestic political turmoil, landing alongside the resignation of the prime minister [4]. The easing is real but bounded: friendlier holding rules paired with reserve and issuance guardrails that issuers may still find heavy.
The wider frame: central banks are building both rails at once. The same window had the Bank of Korea advancing a CBDC deposit-token pilot in real-world banking systems [5], and Japan's corporate pension plans floated a 1% crypto allocation [4]. The public-money and private-stablecoin tracks are being laid in parallel, not as substitutes — and the UK just moved its private-stablecoin track forward.
