UK Grants Bank of England New Mandate to Foster Digital Currency Innovation

The UK Treasury has granted the Bank of England a new mandate to promote innovation in digital currency and payments. The move aims to strengthen the country's competitiveness in digital finance while maintaining financial stability as the primary objective.

Under the new mandate, the Bank of England will be required to report annually to Parliament on its progress toward promoting innovation. This includes exploring technologies such as tokenization and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), which are seen as having the potential to transform financial markets worldwide.

The UK government's decision comes after Prime Minister Andy Burnham made London's digital asset competitiveness a policy priority. The move is also aligned with the FCA's relaxed stablecoin rules, which lowered capital requirements for issuers to 1% of total value in circulation.