Revolut and three firms join FCA stablecoin sandbox
Context and Chronology
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority has chosen four companies from a field of 20 to run supervised trials of fiat‑linked digital tokens: Revolut, Monee Financial Technologies, ReStabilise and VVTX. The FCA frames the cohort as a controlled environment to observe how fiat‑pegged tokens behave in real operational settings while safeguarding consumers; the regulator’s announcement is available via its press release. Firms in the sandbox will produce usage and resilience data that the FCA intends to feed into rule design for issuance, custody and consumer protections.
The FCA selection is one strand of a broader UK push to operationalise tokenisation. Separately, the Bank of England is convening a larger six‑month technical lab — starting in spring 2026 — that will bring roughly 18 market utilities, banks, fintechs and decentralised‑technology teams together to test token settlement against the planned RT2 ledger. That programme targets linked delivery‑versus‑payment and payment‑versus‑payment workflows and is structured as an engineering‑led, no‑actual‑funds sandbox to probe cross‑platform settlement determinism, messaging standards, timing constraints and failure‑recovery logic.
The Treasury has also commissioned an operational pilot to explore tokenised UK sovereign debt, appointing HSBC and law firm Ashurst to run a trial within the Bank of England’s testing environment. That exercise is explicitly designed to probe legal clarity, ownership rules and how tokenised securities might interact with central bank money and RTGS finality.
Alongside these experiments, the House of Lords Financial Services Regulation Committee has opened an inquiry into proposed UK stablecoin rules and set a written‑evidence deadline of March 11, 2026. The Lords’ review will scrutinise operational resilience, consumer protection, access to payments infrastructure and the interaction between proposed Bank of England and FCA frameworks. Notably, Bank of England draft positions under consideration include minimum backing arrangements that could require a substantial fraction of reserves — drafts have discussed a floor around 40% held in central bank deposits — reflecting concern about deposit migration from commercial banks and wider financial‑stability effects.
Taken together, these initiatives indicate a coordinated, evidence‑led approach: the FCA’s conduct‑focused sandbox will supply behavioural and consumer‑protection evidence; the Bank of England’s lab will probe settlement mechanics and integration with RTGS design; and the Treasury pilot will stress legal and market plumbing for tokenised sovereign instruments. However, timelines and emphasis differ across programmes — while sandbox outputs are intended to accelerate rule design, policy implementation is likely to play out across 2026–2027 as consultations, inquiries and technical reports converge.
Operational questions remain central: where reserves are held, how custody and redemption mechanics perform under stress, whether cross‑platform settlement can be deterministic, and what access rules will govern payments rails and central bank facilities. The combined testing agenda will shape whether the UK pursues a broadly permissive route to stablecoin access or opts for tighter containment tools (reserve composition, central bank liquidity backstops or restricted access to core rails) to limit systemic spillovers.
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