The Bank of England's Deputy Governor for Financial Stability, Sarah Breeden, has signaled there is no urgency to launch a UK central bank digital currency (CBDC), telling an Atlantic Council event on the sidelines of the IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings in Bangkok that regulated sterling stablecoins and tokenised bank deposits may deliver the same benefits a retail digital pound was designed to provide. The remarks come as the Bank and HM Treasury approach the end of the d

ESMA has directed national regulators to require MiCA-authorised crypto firms to stop servicing non-compliant stablecoins, with legacy exposure to be cleared within three months.

The Australian Taxation Office has released draft rulings on airdrops and on the smart contracts used to wrap and unwrap tokens. These two instruments remain in draft form and subject to finalisation. The built upon existing web guidance but, if implemented, will bind the Commissioner and, by extension, taxpayers. The timing of these draft rulings is curious given a major threshold question on the legal recognition of bitcoin as property remains pending before the High Court

In April this year, Australia passed legislation recognising digital asset and tokenised custody platforms as two new types of financial products. These reforms establish a bespoke regulatory framework for custodial digital asset exchanges and trading platforms that is integrated within the existing Australian financial services framework. Today, ASIC released its draft guidance, standards and financial requirements which support these reforms. For exchanges, the headline ite

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has released a consultation (CS 64) proposing to keep its contracts for difference (CFD) product intervention order in place for a further ten years, out to 2037. The order is otherwise due to lapse on 23 May 2027. Alongside the extension, ASIC seeks to tighten the margin rules, spell out the inducement carve-outs and, of particular interest to the digital asset sector, bring CFDs settled by the transfer of digital a

The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics has released its report, A Level Paying Field, following its inquiry into payment schemes, digital wallets and innovation in the payments sector. While much of the report focuses on card payments, merchant fees and digital wallets, one recommendation stands out for the digital asset sector: Treasury should establish a framework enabling stablecoins to operate as an alternate payment rail within Australia's payments

Australians will today kiss most card surcharges goodbye, following changes announced by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) to remove its prohibition on “no-surcharge” rules. This change will be effective from 1 October 2026. How do the current rules work? Australia's card surcharging rules sit within a regulatory framework established under the Payment Systems (Regulation) Act 1998 (Cth) (the Act). Section 18 of the Act empowers the RBA to determine standards for participan

The US Senate has failed to clear the procedural threshold needed to advance the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act (H.R. 3633), with Tuesday's cloture vote falling short of the 60 votes required to move the bill forward. The result ends, for now, the closest the United States has come to a single statutory framework dividing crypto oversight between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and pushes the question of who regulates dig

Sam Bankman-Fried has filed a petition for a writ of certiorari with the United States Supreme Court, seeking review of his 2023 conviction on seven counts of wire fraud, conspiracy and money laundering arising from the collapse of FTX, together with the US$11.02 billion forfeiture order that accompanied his 25-year sentence. The petition was filed on 10 September 2026 by Stanford law professor Jeffrey Fisher, and follows a Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in June that