US and UK Treasury plan shared rules for tokenization and stablecoins

The U.S. Department of the Treasury and the UK’s HM Treasury have released joint recommendations as part of a transatlantic working group aimed at coordinating financial-market oversight for digital assets—specifically stablecoins and tokenized finance.

In a statement published Tuesday, the two agencies said they want to align regulatory expectations in ways that promote financial stability without creating unnecessary market distortions. The guidance also points toward cross-border testing for tokenized assets and closer coordination between U.S. regulators and the Bank of England on shared approaches to tokenized-asset rules.

Key takeaways

• The U.S. and UK called for regulatory alignment around stablecoins, emphasizing requirements that avoid undermining cross-border competition.
• Stablecoins, under the joint framework, should be fully backed—at least on a one-to-one basis—by high-quality, liquid assets.
• For tokenized finance, the statement suggests authorities should consider a private-sector-led group to test cross-border use cases.
• The UK is pushing tokenization forward with a government-backed report that links adoption to meaningful economic gains by 2035.

Transatlantic recommendations target stablecoins and tokenization

The Treasury and HM Treasury’s joint statement was issued under the Transatlantic Taskforce for the Markets of the Future, a bilateral effort focused on cooperation across financial markets. According to the agencies, the recommendations reflect an intent to tailor rules in each jurisdiction while aiming for comparable outcomes for comparable risks and activities.

For stablecoins, the two governments said their goal is to support a “dynamic stablecoin market across borders.” The statement frames this as a balancing act: moving toward regulatory alignment while avoiding outcomes that could destabilize markets or discourage cross-border competition.

Crucially, the stablecoin guidance does not stop at general principles. The statement explicitly says stablecoins should be “fully backed, on at least a one-to-one basis, by high-quality, liquid assets.” That requirement mirrors the core concept embedded in U.S. legislation discussed in the same context.

The U.S. side did not explicitly name the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act in the joint recommendations, though the statement’s “fully backed” framing is aligned with the approach that U.S. law takes. GENIUS was signed into law last year, and is waiting for regulations to be approved before its effective date in January 2027.

Cross-border testing and shared approaches for tokenized assets

Beyond stablecoins, the joint statement contains recommendations for tokenized finance and cross-border activity. The task force urged authorities to consider the creation of a private-sector-led group focused on “testing of cross-border use cases for tokenized assets.”

That emphasis on use-case testing matters because tokenization can mean very different implementations depending on the asset class, settlement structure, and counterparties involved. Cross-border testing is positioned as a practical step to identify where regulatory expectations diverge and where common standards might emerge through real-world experimentation.

On regulation itself, the statement says U.S. financial agencies and the Bank of England should identify shared approaches to the regulation of tokenized assets. While the statement does not lay out specific rule text, it signals that regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are looking for convergence in how tokenized assets are treated from a supervisory and risk-management perspective.

UK report links tokenization to economic upside—by 2035

The U.S.-UK recommendations arrive after renewed attention in the UK on tokenization’s potential economic benefits. Earlier coverage from Cointelegraph highlighted a UK government-backed industry task force report claiming the country could add up to $44 billion to annual economic output by 2035, if the UK becomes a leading jurisdiction for tokenization, tokenization scales globally, and domestic adoption grows alongside major peers.

In that report, the task force called for the UK to issue tokenized bonds by the first quarter of 2027 and proposed testing financial transactions on the blockchain. Those proposals point toward a strategy of moving from policy discussions toward concrete market infrastructure steps—something that would likely raise the stakes for regulators to define consistent frameworks for tokenized securities and settlement.

Read together, the transatlantic message from Treasury and HM Treasury underscores how tokenization is increasingly being treated not just as a technology topic, but as a cross-border financial market issue requiring coordination. If tokenized debt instruments and other blockchain-based transactions expand, regulators will need shared expectations on matters like custody, settlement finality, disclosure, and the perimeter of existing financial rules.

What investors and builders should watch next

These joint recommendations are best viewed as a direction-setting effort: they establish how the U.S. and UK want to align on stablecoin backing standards and how they may collaborate on tokenized-asset testing and regulatory coherence. For market participants, the most immediate question is how quickly alignment translates into implementable guidance—especially given that the U.S. stablecoin regime is still waiting on implementing regulations under GENIUS.

As the UK pursues tokenized bonds and blockchain transaction testing toward 2027, and as U.S. rulemaking progresses toward GENIUS’s timeline, the key watch items are whether cross-border use-case testing produces concrete recommendations and whether “comparable outcomes” on stablecoin and tokenized-asset regulation become more specific in practice.