Bitcoin trades 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and stablecoins can cross borders in seconds on a Sunday morning. And yet, if a major UK institution needed to move collateral, settle a high-value payment, or shift liquidity between clearing houses over the weekend, much of that activity had to queue up and wait.
In 2026, trillions of dollars in financial obligations still move through settlement infrastructure designed around the rhythm of a pre-internet economy, with business hours, weekday cycles, and overnight pauses baked into systems that predate smartphones by decades.
That's the problem the Bank of England wants to resolve. On May 18, the BoE launched a formal consultation on extending the operating hours of its payments infrastructure, as it works toward a long-term objective of near 24/7 settlement. The proposals cover RTGS, the Real-Time Gross Settlement system, and CHAPS, the UK's high-value payment network.
They're both part of a coordinated package that also includes a joint tokenization vision from the Bank and the FCA setting out shared principles for digital wholesale markets. The Prudential Regulation Authority also published letters setting out updated guidance on the treatment of tokenized asset exposures and on innovations in deposits, e-money, and stablecoins.
Taken as a whole, this is a coordinated signal that financial regulators in the UK have shifted from treating blockchain-native finance as a problem to manage toward treating it as a reference point for how markets should be redesigned.
The infrastructure of the UK's financial system
RTGS is the system through which UK banks hold and exchange reserves at the Bank of England, settling payment obligations in central bank money on a gross, real-time basis. CHAPS runs on top of it and handles high-value transactions: mortgage completions, corporate payments, and the settlement of financial market trades. Both systems are extremely safe and have operated without systemic failure for decades.
However, they're also very temporally constrained. That's become a big problem as global markets have internationalized and as digital asset markets have demonstrated what continuously available settlement actually looks like. When RTGS and CHAPS go offline overnight and across weekends, capital gets trapped, exposures accumulate, and institutions hold precautionary liquidity buffers to cover the gap.
The BoE's consultation paper sets out two next steps toward near 24/7 settlement: an additional settlement day on weekends, most likely on Sundays, alongside settlement on certain UK bank holidays; and the lengthening of the settlement window on existing settlement days. Those changes wouldn't take place before 2029, and longer hours wouldn't be introduced until 2031. Regulators heard clearly from industry that a single-step full extension would be operationally punishing, so the BoE structured a phased pathway that lets companies build internal capabilities alongside the infrastructure changes.
The longer-term end-states under review include a 22×6 model and near-continuous 23.5×7 CHAPS settlement, which would bring the central settlement layer into close alignment with the always-on architecture that blockchain networks already use. Beyond the hours extension, the Bank is committing to launch a live synchronization service, targeted for 2028, working to enable tokenized equivalents of already eligible assets to be used as collateral both at central counterparties and in its own central bank operations.
That synchronization commitment is arguably the more consequential of the two. When the asset leg and the cash leg of a transaction can move simultaneously and conditionally on a distributed ledger, the entire counterparty risk changes. Tokenization reshapes the settlement problem because the asset leg can move faster than the cash leg under current infrastructure, and a synchronization interface at the central bank level closes that mismatch exactly where it needs to be closed for the change to carry systemic weight.
On the stablecoin side, the PRA's updated letter is a meaningful shift toward a lighter approach to wholesale stablecoins. Banks considering stablecoin issuance exclusively for wholesale customers are invited to engage with supervisors early, with the PRA signaling it'll take a “proportionate approach” to assessing proposals.
That's a big concession from a regulator that has historically insisted retail stablecoin activity must sit in a fully ring-fenced, insolvency-remote entity separate from the deposit-taking institution itself. For wholesale settlement specifically, the door is now more open than it has ever been.
What changes when UK capital can move around the clock
The market implications of near-continuous settlement run across several interconnected areas, and the most immediate involves collateral mobility.
Banks and large institutions move collateral constantly across repo markets, derivatives positions, clearing houses, and sovereign debt obligations, and today that movement is constrained by settlement system timing. Collateral that can't be repositioned on a Saturday night creates liquidity buffers that tie up capital for days at a time, and the cost of those buffers is ultimately borne across the entire system.
Extended settlement hours, combined with the ability to use tokenized equivalents of already eligible assets as regulatory collateral at central counterparties, would dramatically reduce that friction. The Bank has confirmed that policy guidance on exactly how tokenized collateral will qualify under UK EMIR is expected later this year.
The systemic risk implications are equally significant. Settlement failures and overnight exposures become particularly dangerous when credit conditions tighten quickly, and the 2008 financial crisis was partly a settlement crisis: counterparties couldn't trust that obligations would be met in time, so they stopped transacting altogether. An infrastructure capable of near-continuous atomic settlement changes that, as it compresses the window during which failures can cascade.
The FCA and Bank of England are currently working with 16 companies on the live issuance and settlement of tokenized assets through the Digital Securities Sandbox, the most advanced live tokenization testing environment of any G7 regulator. The sandbox runs through early 2029, with the application window expected to close around March 2027, and it's already hosting HM Treasury's pilot digital gilt instrument, DIGIT.
The BoE has also committed to expanding the sandbox's range of settlement assets to include regulated stablecoins, working toward a multi-money system in which stablecoins, tokenized bank deposits, and central bank money all operate across compatible rails.
A government running sovereign debt experiments on a blockchain sandbox of its own design is a pretty unambiguous statement of regulatory intent.
The global race no market can afford to lose
The UK's accelerating pace on all of this reflects pressure from multiple directions at once, and central banks arrived at these proposals by reacting to a market that scaled faster than incumbents expected.
The gap between digital asset architecture and regulated financial infrastructure widened to the point where it couldn't be papered over. The US started building clearer rails where crypto intersects mainstream finance most directly: payment stablecoins got a federal framework and an implementation path for banks. The EU has been turning MiCA into an operating standard, with supervisors tightening implementation timelines and pushing firms toward licensing at scale. Singapore has built digital asset infrastructure explicitly designed for institutional settlement use cases, and Middle Eastern financial centers have been aggressive in recruiting digital asset businesses with favorable regulatory frameworks.
Financial centers now seem to understand that if digital settlement infrastructure matures elsewhere first, the cost of catching up compounds with every year of delay.
The current situation in the UK clearly shows that urgency. The Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Cryptoassets) Regulations 2026 were enacted in February of this year, establishing the full statutory framework for regulating cryptoasset activities in the UK, with the new regime expected to come into force in October 2027. Revolut's pound stablecoin trial inside the FCA's stablecoin cohort sandbox puts the product in front of the company's 12 million UK users, and the FCA's selection of four firms to test stablecoin products and services, representing a range of use cases including payments, wholesale settlement, and crypto trading, is feeding directly into the final stablecoin rules expected later in 2026. The FCA's broader crypto roadmap has made the rulemaking pipeline far more legible to firms than it was even eighteen months ago, and that legibility is itself a competitive signal.
The risks embedded in all of this are real, and the Bank's consultation has been clear about them. Extending settlement hours introduces operational complexity and new cybersecurity exposures across the entire participant ecosystem. The synchronization interface needs to be built to RTGS-grade resilience standards, which is an unbelievably high bar, and liquidity management across an extended window changes the timing of reserve requirements and interest calculations in ways that still need to be fully worked through.
The BoE is now looking for industry feedback on the sequencing of these steps, with submissions due by July 3. Following that deadline, the Bank and FCA have committed to industry workshops, a summer feedback statement, and a cross-authority digital wholesale market roadmap before year-end.
For years, the only version of digital finance was the one where blockchain infrastructure developed alongside traditional markets as a parallel and largely separate system.
The Bank of England's proposals now tell us that era is drawing to a close. Central bank infrastructure is being redesigned to incorporate the architecture that digital markets demonstrated first (continuous settlement, programmable assets, atomic execution), and the process is now far enough along that concrete timelines exist where there were once only discussion papers. Whether the full vision plays out over five years or fifteen, the direction has become difficult to mistake.
