Stablecoins were the week's fastest-climbing topic in our corpus, and the driver wasn't a single rule - it was regulators moving in opposite directions at the same time. The same authorities loosened one constraint and tightened another, leaving issuers reading a rulebook being written from both ends at once.
The Bank of England: loosen the cap, tighten the reserve
The Bank of England rewrote its sterling-stablecoin framework after industry pushback. It removed the individual holding caps it had previously floated, replacing them with a temporary 40 billion pound issuance limit per coin [1][2][3]. In the same set of rules it set a 30% central-bank reserve requirement for systemic issuers and signaled regulated UK stablecoins by 2027 [4]. The net effect: more room to hold, less room to run unbacked.
The US: ID rules proposed, a CBDC banned
On the US side, the Federal Reserve released a 130-page proposal requiring stablecoin issuers to run customer-identification programs, with the stated aim of AML compliance - still at the proposal stage [5], alongside a Treasury ID framework under the GENIUS Act [6]. At the same time, the Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act by an 85-5 vote, carrying a four-year ban on a Federal Reserve CBDC through 2030 [7][8][9][10]. Private dollar tokens gained a clearer compliance path and lost a prospective state-issued rival in the same week.
The derivatives turf war opened in court
Beyond stablecoins, the week's other regulatory thread was jurisdictional. CME Group filed suit against the CFTC, alleging the agency abruptly shifted to allow perpetual-futures trading in the US [11][12]. In parallel, the CFTC and SEC jointly opened public-comment windows to harmonize derivatives product definitions, swaps data-reporting frameworks, and the meaning of the term swaps itself [13][14][15][16]. The questions of who oversees perps, and how crypto derivatives get classified, moved from memo to docket.
Enforcement and the global map
Enforcement stayed active. The CFTC permanently banned Celsius founder Alexander Mashinsky from trading and registration [17]. G7 leaders called for coordinated action against North Korean crypto theft [18]. Ireland flagged very significant money-laundering and terrorism-financing risks in its first digital-asset assessment in seven years, targeting standards by the second half of 2027 [19], and Japan suspended moomoo Securities for three months [20]. Across the Atlantic, EU lawmakers advanced the digital-euro bill toward a 2029 target [21], while Ripple secured MiCA approval in Luxembourg and SBI Group launched a yen-linked stablecoin [22].
The through-line: regulators spent the week defining the rails rather than blocking them - but the rails are being laid at different gauges in every jurisdiction.
