Dealer-dealers regulated by the U.S. Securities and Trade Fee (SEC) can deal with their stablecoin holdings as regulatory capital, in response to a tweak this week to a frequently-asked-questions doc maintained by the company.
That is a seismic shift supplied within the type of a minor addition to the SEC’s “Dealer Vendor Monetary Duties” FAQ. It is on-brand for a regulator that has made a gradual collection of adjustments to its crypto method by means of casual steering, business correspondence and workers statements ever since its Crypto Process Drive started work throughout the administration of President Donald Trump.
On this case, a brand new query No. 5 was added about what sort of “haircut” a agency ought to tackle its holdings of stablecoins — the dollar-tied tokens similar to Circle’s USDC and Tether’s USDT. The reply was 2%, that means that as an alternative of the earlier understanding that such property weren’t thought of measurable in opposition to a broker-dealer’s capital tally (100% haircut), the corporations will have the ability to rely 98% of these holdings.
“Whereas this steering doesn’t create new guidelines, it helps cut back uncertainty for corporations looking for to function compliantly below present securities legal guidelines,” mentioned Cody Carbone, CEO of the Digital Chamber.
This places stablecoins on the identical footing as different monetary merchandise.
“Which means stablecoins at the moment are handled like cash market funds on a agency’s stability sheet,” Tonya Evans, a former professor who now runs a crypto training enterprise and is on the board of administrators at Digital Foreign money Group, wrote in a submit on social media web site X. “Till right now, some broker-dealers have been zeroing out stablecoin holdings of their capital calculations. Holding them was a monetary penalty. That’s over.”
Earlier than, the extra stringent SEC limits meant these firms — corporations registered with the SEC to deal with clients’ securities transactions and likewise commerce in securities on their very own behalf — weren’t simply in a position to custody tokenized securities or act as a go-between for buying and selling. Now the corporations that observe this steer from the company will have the ability to extra simply present liquidity, help settlement and advance tokenized finance.
“All over the place from Robinhood to Goldman Sachs run on these calculations,” Larry Florio, deputy common counsel at Ethena Labs, wrote in an explainer posted on LinkedIn. Stablecoins at the moment are working capital, he mentioned.
SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce runs the company’s process drive and issued a press release on the change, contending that utilizing stablecoins “will make it possible for broker-dealers to have interaction in a broader vary of enterprise actions referring to tokenized securities and different crypto property.” And she or he mentioned she desires to contemplate how the prevailing SEC guidelines “might be amended to account for cost stablecoins.”
That is the downside of casual workers insurance policies — they’re as simple to reverse as they have been to challenge, they usually do not carry the burden (and authorized protections) of a rule.
The SEC has been engaged on some crypto guidelines in latest months, however they have not but been produced, and the method normally takes a number of months — generally years. Even a proper rule can nonetheless be reversed by a brand new management on the company, which is why crypto advocates are pushing for extra laws from Congress that might set the federal government’s digital property method into legislation, similar to final yr’s Guiding and Establishing Nationwide Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act.
UPDATE (February 20, 2026, 22:23 UTC): Provides remark from Digital Chamber CEO.
