Crypto treasury executives are calling on the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS), a global banking regulatory physique, to revise the 1,250% danger weight for Bitcoin and different cryptocurrencies beneath the Basel III framework.
The 1,250% capital requirement implies that banks should again any Bitcoin (BTC) on their stability sheets at a 1:1 ratio with authorized collateral, making BTC holding extra pricey than different asset courses.
For comparability, money, bodily gold and authorities debt carry a 0% danger weight beneath the Basel III framework.
“If the US needs to be the ‘crypto capital’ of the world, the banking laws want to vary. Danger is mispriced,” Jeff Walton, chief danger officer at Bitcoin treasury firm Attempt, wrote on X.
The capital guidelines beneath Basel III discourage banks from holding BTC and crypto due to the comparatively excessive price of holding digital belongings vis-a-vis reserve necessities, which lowers a financial institution’s return on fairness, a essential metric for financial institution profitability, in response to Chris Perkins, president of funding firm CoinFund.
Associated: Banks can’t appear to service crypto, even because it goes mainstream
Basel responds to rising backlash and stress from the crypto trade
The Basel Committee proposed the present danger weightings in 2021, putting BTC and different cryptocurrencies within the highest danger class and imposing a 1,250% danger weight on digital belongings.
In 2024, the committee finalized the capital necessities outlined within the 2021 proposal, which drew heavy backlash from the crypto trade.
The present guidelines characterize a “totally different sort of chokepoint” than the overt debanking of crypto corporations in what some trade insiders dubbed Operation Chokepoint 2.0, Perkins instructed Cointelegraph in August 2025.
“It’s a really nuanced manner of suppressing exercise by making it so costly for the financial institution to do these actions,” Perkins mentioned.
In October 2025, reviews emerged that the committee was contemplating easing the capital necessities for digital belongings in response to the surge within the stablecoin market cap, which is nearing $300 billion, in response to knowledge from RWA.xyz.
The next month, Erik Thedéen, chair of the BCBS, mentioned the worldwide banking regulator may have a “totally different strategy” to the 1,250% danger weight for cryptocurrencies, signaling a possible change in reserve necessities.
Journal: Crypto needed to overthrow banks, now it’s changing into them within the stablecoin struggle