U.S. and UK back cross-border tokenization and stablecoin coordination in regulatory roadmap

The United States and the United Kingdom have published 10 joint recommendations to align their approaches to stablecoins, tokenized assets and capital markets, extending a transatlantic effort to make blockchain-based finance easier to operate across both jurisdictions. At the core of the roadmap is a proposed private-sector working group that would pilot real cross-border tokenization use cases under coordinated supervision, testing whether harmonized rules can work in practice when assets move between the two markets. The roadmap calls on the Bank of England, the Financial Conduct Authority, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to work toward compatible oversight of tokenized securities rather than separate regulatory silos. It also promotes what it describes as "regulatory concord" for stablecoins and aims to reduce the friction companies face when issuing tokenized securities across both markets. The package, released July 14 by HM Treasury and the U.S. Treasury through the Transatlantic Taskforce for Markets of the Future, does not create mutual recognition or binding rules. Instead, it sets a shared direction while each country continues its own legislative and regulatory process. Separately, the UK and U.S. governments said through the Future of Financial Innovation and Digital Assets working group that payment stablecoins should be fully backed 1:1 by high-quality liquid assets, with reserves segregated from issuer funds and common standards for custody, redemption, market access, cross-border use and legal-rights disclosures. The governments also said lawful, regulated stablecoin and digital-asset providers should have fair, risk-based access to financial services and markets, and they committed to exploring pathways for stablecoins issued in one jurisdiction to access the other’s market. The UK launched its Digital Securities Sandbox in 2024, due to run until 2029, while the United States has been developing frameworks for tokenized securities and stablecoin reserves. The UK government has projected that tokenized wholesale markets could generate £33 billion in annual economic output by 2035 and £14 billion in annual annual tax revenue from the tokenization sector by that date.