US Regulators Rewrite Banking Rules, Somehow Forget Bitcoin Exists

Pierre Rochard, CEO of The Bitcoin Bond Company, has a message for US banking regulators: you can't quietly decide how banks treat Bitcoin without actually mentioning Bitcoin. It's like writing a cookbook and forgetting to include ingredients—technically impressive in its emptiness, but missing the whole point.

In a formal comment submitted March 29 to the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Rochard warned that the agencies' sweeping Basel III capital rewrite leaves a critical gap unresolved: how Bitcoin-related activities should be treated. The man basically had to point at the elephant in the room and ask, "Hey, are we just going to pretend this 21st-century financial beast isn't standing here?"

The regulators' March 19 proposals comprehensively overhaul the US bank capital framework, covering credit risk, market risk, operational risk and counterparty exposures for the largest US banks. There's just one small omission—Bitcoin, crypto and digital assets aren't mentioned a single time. Not once. It's the financial equivalent of writing a history book about the 21st century and accidentally leaving out the internet.

That's a problem because Basel already imposes a harsh 1,250% risk weight on certain unbacked crypto exposures through its SCO60 framework. The US proposals don't say whether that framework will apply to Bitcoin-related activities, leaving the economics of custody, lending, derivatives and direct holdings in regulatory limbo. Banks are left guessing whether they'll need a Scrooge McDuck-level money bin to cover potential capital requirements, or if they can just treat Bitcoin like it's monopoly money—which, frankly, regulators seem to think it already is.

Rochard argued that regulators can't leave that question unresolved. A final rule that quietly imposes or preserves a capital treatment for Bitcoin without explicit explanation could face legal vulnerability. Nothing says "we definitely thought this through" like leaving the most contentious asset class of the decade in regulatory