Revised bank capital rules could lower barriers to institutional Bitcoin adoption, as lawmakers press the Fed, FDIC and OCC to revisit treatment they say makes bank holdings prohibitively costly.
U.S. senators are pressing federal banking regulators to revisit the 1,250% risk weight applied to Bitcoin on bank balance sheets, arguing that the capital treatment effectively makes the asset too expensive for banks to hold. Risk weights determine how much capital a bank must set aside against an exposure, and a 1,250% weighting is among the harshest forms of prudential treatment. The push, aimed at the Federal Reserve, FDIC and OCC, underscores an ongoing debate over how U.S. banking overseers classify digital-asset risk and whether current capital rules are unnecessarily limiting institutional Bitcoin adoption.