Overview
- FSOC’s 2025 annual report ends a three‑year designation of digital assets as a financial‑system vulnerability and moves them into a neutral monitoring category.
- The council conditions its assessment on orderly spot ETF flows, fully backed stablecoins, and no major failures in custody or blockchain bridges.
- Policy drivers include President Trump’s Executive Order 14178, which bans a U.S. CBDC and promotes digital assets, and the GENIUS Act, which mandates 100% backing for permitted payment stablecoins under bank regulators.
- The SEC rescinded SAB 121 via SAB 122, and the OCC’s Interpretive Letter 1188 and related guidance enable riskless‑principal crypto intermediation, limited native token holdings for fees, and preliminary national trust charters for firms including Circle, Ripple, BitGo, Paxos, and Fidelity Digital Assets.
- FSOC urges member agencies to keep clarifying permissible activities such as custody, tokenization, and stablecoin deposits, while global bodies FSB and FATF continue to flag fragmented standards and AML/CFT compliance gaps.