Today in crypto, the chair of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision told the FT they may need a “different approach” to the current 1,250% risk weighting for crypto exposures that applies to banks, US Senator Tim Scott said he’s pushing a vote on the crypto market structure bill in December, and a Cloudflare outage temporarily blocked access to several cryptocurrency platforms and social media sites.
US and UK revolt forces Basel to rethink brutal crypto capital rules for banks
Global bank regulators are preparing to revisit their most stringent crypto rules after the United States and the United Kingdom refused to implement them, a move that threatens to unravel the long-standing consensus of the Basel Committee.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Erik Thedéen, the governor of the Swedish central bank and chair of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS), said they may need a “different approach” to the current 1,250% risk weighting for crypto exposures.
According to global law firm White & Case, the application of the 1,250% risk weight means that credit institutions must hold their own funds of at least equal value to the amount of the respective crypto-asset exposure.
Under the existing framework, crypto assets issued on a permissionless blockchain, which includes stablecoins such as USDt (USDT) and USDC (USDC), receive the same 1,250% risk weighting used for the riskiest venture investments.
However, Thedéen acknowledged that the rapid growth of regulated stablecoins has changed the policy landscape. “What has happened has been fairly dramatic,” Thedéen told the Financial Times, adding that there is a strong increase in stablecoins and that the amount of assets in the system calls for a new approach.
Senator Tim Scott pushes for December vote on crypto market bill
Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott said on Tuesday that he’s eyeing to mark up a crypto market structure bill next month to have it on President Donald Trump’s desk by early 2026.
“Next month, we believe we can mark up in both committees and get this to the floor of the Senate early next year so that President Trump will sign the legislation making America the crypto capital of the world,” Scott told Fox Business, accusing Democrats of stalling efforts to advance the bill.
The House passed the CLARITY Act in July, which outlines the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s power to regulate crypto, and the Senate has been working on its own version of the bill through its Banking Committee and Agriculture Committee with the aim of marrying up the two bills.
Meanwhile, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in a video posted to X that he was in Washington, DC, “pushing for market structure legislation,” and noted there had been “a lot of progress.”
“We’ve got a good chance, I think, of a markup for this bill in December, hopefully get it to the president’s desk shortly thereafter,” Armstrong said.
Crypto sites, social media channels hit with Cloudflare outage
Several cryptocurrency platforms and social media channels reported network disruptions on Tuesday after a Cloudflare incident temporarily blocked access to the front end of numerous crypto websites. The company attributed the issue to an “internal service degradation.”
The outage affected the user-facing services of major exchanges, including Coinbase and BitMEX, as well as platforms such as Blockchain.com, Ledger, Toncoin and DefiLlama. Kraken also reported downtime but later said it had implemented a fix.
“[T]he root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic,” a Cloudflare spokesperson told Cointelegraph. “The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services.”
Although many crypto platforms aim for decentralization, they still rely on centralized servers, leaving them vulnerable to downtime during outages.