Regulators Drop Massive Basel Rewrite, Somehow Manage to Skip Bitcoin Entirely

Pierre Rochard, CEO of The Bitcoin Bond Company, is calling out US banking regulators for a glaring omission in their sweeping Basel III capital rewrite. In a formal comment submitted March 29 to the Federal Reserve, FDIC, and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Rochard warned that the proposals leave completely unresolved how Bitcoin-related activities should be treated—a gap he says could create legal risk and shape how much capital banks must hold against the asset.

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. It's basically a 1,200-page love letter to risk management, touching every conceivable corner of banking except—you know—the one asset class that actually makes bankers lose sleep at night.

But here's the kicker: Bitcoin, crypto, or digital assets aren't mentioned a single time. Not once. It's like writing a cookbook and somehow forgetting to include instructions for the main ingredient. The document that will dictate how banks allocate billions in capital somehow went full ostrich on the entire Bitcoin situation.

That silence is a problem. The Basel Committee's crypto asset framework (SCO60) already imposes a harsh 1,250% risk weight on unbacked crypto assets like Bitcoin. For those keeping score at home, that's essentially the regulatory equivalent of a scarlet letter—banks would need to hold more capital against Bitcoin than they do for some sovereign debt. The US proposals don't say whether that framework will apply to Bitcoin-related activities, leaving banks in the dark about the economics of custody, lending, derivatives, and direct holdings.

Rochard argued regulators can't finalize rules that effectively determine capital treatment for Bitcoin activities without clearly explaining the framework and evidence behind that treatment. A final rule that quietly imposes (or preserves) a capital treatment without explicit explanation could face legal vulnerability, he noted. Basically, if you're going to crush an entire industry with regulatory ambiguity,