The Bank of England Has Quietly Decided That Stablecoins Are Real Money

The Bank of England, one of the oldest and most conservative financial institutions on the planet, just put its cards on the table. Stablecoins are not a speculative curiosity. They are not a tech experiment. According to the Bank’s own executive director of financial market infrastructure, stablecoins are being treated as “a new form of money.”

Read that again. 𝐀 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦 𝐨𝐟 𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐲. From Threadneedle Street.

That phrase carries weight that most people in mainstream finance are not yet prepared to process. And that is precisely why this story matters.

Sasha Mills, the Bank of England’s executive director for financial market infrastructure, was not speaking loosely. She chose those words on a panel stage, in front of an audience of institutional players, journalists, and regulators. That is not where you throw out casual language.

She told the room that by the end of the year, the Bank will be open to welcoming applications from those looking to launch “a systemic stablecoin for widely used payments in the U.K.”

That deadline  end of 2026  is not a vague commitment. It is a marker. A clock is now ticking.

But here is the part that deserves the most attention, and got the least: Mills made clear that the Bank is “not picking winners” between tokenized deposits and stablecoins, acknowledging that at this stage, “we do not know which use case is better suited for which type of new money.”

This is remarkable intellectual honesty from a central bank. They are admitting uncertainty in a space where most regulators pretend they have all the answers. They are saying: we do not yet know how the market will settle. We are building the rails, not choosing the train.

Mills explained that stablecoins “need to be equally robust as all the other forms of money,” enabling end users to “choose in an interoperable way” between alternatives  tokenized deposits, stablecoins, e-money. “That preference,” she said, “will come with experience.”

That sentence  “that preference will come with experience”  should be printed and pinned above the desk of every crypto skeptic still demanding that digital money prove itself before being taken seriously. The Bank of England is not demanding proof of concept anymore. It is building the environment where proof of concept can happen in real time, with real users, under real oversight.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐆𝐁𝐏 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐢𝐧 𝐐𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐍𝐨𝐛𝐨𝐝𝐲 𝐖𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐀𝐧𝐬𝐰𝐞𝐫

Here is the uncomfortable truth sitting in the middle of this conversation: 99% of global stablecoins are denominated in US dollars.  The pound sterling is barely a footnote in this market. And yet, the entire UK regulatory architecture being constructed right now is premised on the idea that a GBP stablecoin can and should exist.

Matthew Long, director for Payments and Digital Assets at the Financial Conduct Authority, pushed back against the narrative that sterling has already lost the race. “We’ve created a regime where we could have a trusted, redeemable stablecoin, which we’re proud to stand behind,” he said, pointing out that the FCA has approved four firms to operate in its regulatory sandbox.

What he did not say  and what I will say is that approving firms for a sandbox and actually seeing a GBP stablecoin gain meaningful traction in global payments are two very different things. The sandbox is a beginning, not an outcome.

Long acknowledged that “it’s for industry to deliver the stablecoin”  the regulator’s job is to support growth, not manufacture it. That is fair. But it also puts the burden squarely back on the private sector, in a market where dollar dominance is deeply entrenched and network effects are brutal.

One of those sandbox firms, neobank Revolut, has been widely discussed as a potential GBP stablecoin issuer. But prediction markets are not exactly holding their breath, users are currently placing just a 13% chance on Revolut announcing the launch of its own stablecoin before July.

Mills also addressed something that has been hovering over this conversation since the US passed the GENIUS Act  legislation that formally brought stablecoins into the American regulatory fold. She noted that while 99% of global stablecoins are dollar-denominated, they were created before the GENIUS Act came into force, meaning they are not GENIUS-compliant.

This is a significant point. The existing stablecoin landscape is essentially being asked to rebuild itself under new legal frameworks on both sides of the Atlantic simultaneously. Issuers operating in dollars are now navigating US compliance requirements. Anyone who wants to operate in the UK will soon face the Bank of England’s systemic stablecoin regime.

Mills said that in terms of timing, the UK is “in the same place” as the US , with its full package for systemic stablecoins accepting applications by the end of the year. Competitive framing, but probably accurate. Neither jurisdiction has a meaningful head start at the implementation level  both are racing to make their framework the one that serious issuers want to build under.

Mills added that while the UK’s stablecoin regime “is perceived as being more robust,” that is “because we’re allowing it and treating it in a way that is money.”

𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐌𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐁𝐞𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬

I have been covering financial infrastructure for over thirty years. I watched central banks dismiss Bitcoin as a passing fad. I watched them call Ethereum a curiosity. I watched them hedge and qualify and hedge some more as stablecoins grew from a niche trading mechanism into a multi-hundred-billion-dollar asset class that now moves money faster and cheaper than SWIFT in many corridors.

This moment ,Wednesday, May 13, 2026, at an FT summit in London is the moment the Bank of England stopped hedging. They did not just accept that stablecoins exist. They accepted that stablecoins are money. And when a 300-year-old institution with the power to set the rules for the world’s fifth-largest economy makes that call, every bank, every payments company, every fintech founder, and every skeptical regulator in the world needs to take notice.

The debate is no longer whether stablecoins belong in the financial system. The Bank of England has answered that. The only questions left are who builds them, who regulates them, and who wins the currency wars that follow.

Those answers will define the next decade of global finance.

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