Two of the world's largest financial regulators just admitted they'd rather not write competing rulebooks. On Tuesday, the US Treasury and HM Treasury published a ten-point roadmap built by the Transatlantic Taskforce for Markets of the Future, a group set up specifically to keep American and British rules on tokenized finance from drifting apart.
The SEC and CFTC represent the US side; the FCA and the Bank of England speak for Britain. Together they plan to work out shared approaches to settling tokenized securities, launch an industry-led group to test cross-border tokenization pilots, and figure out whether stablecoins or tokenized money-market funds could serve as collateral in mainstream financial markets.
One rule both sides insisted on spelling out: payment stablecoins must be backed one-to-one by cash and high-quality liquid assets, no exceptions. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent framed the document as proof of "the strength of the U.S. and U.K. financial markets and their shared commitment to supporting economic growth, innovation and competition."
The roadmap itself creates no new binding law — it's a list of things both governments agreed to move on together rather than separately. The UK has already put a number on the stakes: a government-backed task force estimates tokenization could add $44 billion a year to British output by 2035 if the country secures a leading position in the field. London says it plans to issue tokenized government bonds as early as the first quarter of 2027.
