Bitcoin is traded 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and stablecoins can cross the line in seconds on a Sunday morning. And yet, if a major UK institution had to move collateral, settle a high-value payment or shift liquidity between clearinghouses over the weekend, much of that activity involved queuing and waiting.
In 2026, trillions of dollars in financial obligations will still flow through settlement infrastructure designed around the rhythms of a pre-internet economy, with business hours, weekday cycles, and nighttime breaks baked into systems decades older than smartphones.
That is the problem the Bank of England wants to solve. On May 18, the BoE launched a formal consultation on extending the operating hours of its payments infrastructure as it works towards a long-term goal of near 24/7 settlement. The proposals cover RTGS, the Real-Time Gross Settlement system, and CHAPS, Britain’s high-value payments network.
They are both part of a coordinated package that also includes a joint tokenization vision from the Bank and the FCA, setting out shared principles for wholesale digital markets. The Prudential Regulation Authority has also published letters providing updated guidance on the treatment of exposure to tokenized assets and on innovations in deposits, e-money and stablecoins.
Overall, this is a coordinated signal that financial regulators in Britain have moved from treating blockchain-native finance as a problem to treating it as a reference point for how markets should be redesigned.
The infrastructure of the British financial system
RTGS is the system by which UK banks hold and exchange reserves with the Bank of England, settling payment obligations in central bank money on a gross, real-time basis. CHAPS runs on top of it and processes high-value transactions: mortgage closings, corporate payments and the settlement of transactions on the financial market. Both systems are extremely safe and have operated for decades without system failures.
However, they are also very temporally limited. That has become a major problem as global markets have internationalized and digital asset markets have shown what perpetually available settlement actually looks like. When RTGS and CHAPS go offline at night and on weekends, capital becomes tied up, risks pile up, and institutions maintain precautionary liquidity buffers to fill the gap.
The BoE’s consultation document sets out two next steps towards a near 24/7 arrangement: an additional arrangement day at the weekend, most likely on Sundays, in addition to the arrangement on certain UK public holidays; and the extension of the settlement period on existing settlement days. These changes would not happen before 2029, and longer working hours would not be introduced until 2031. Regulators heard clearly from the industry that a full one-step extension would be operationally punishing, so the BoE structured a phased path that will allow companies to build internal capabilities in addition to the infrastructure changes.
The longer-term end states under assessment include a 22×6 model and a 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. In addition to the extension of hours, the Bank commits to launching a live synchronization service, targeting 2028, which will ensure that tokenized equivalents of already eligible assets can be used as collateral, both with central counterparties and in its own central bank transactions.
This synchronization obligation is perhaps the most consequential of the two. When the asset portion and the cash portion 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 part can move faster than the cash part 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 marks a meaningful shift towards a lighter approach to wholesale stablecoins. Banks considering issuing stablecoins for wholesale customers only are invited to engage with regulators early, with the PRA saying it will take a “proportionate approach” to assessing proposals.
That’s a major concession from a regulator that has historically insisted that retail stableco activity must take place in a fully ring-fenced, insolvency-secluded entity, separate from the depository institution itself. The door is now wider open than ever before, especially for wholesale settlement.
What changes if British capital can move around the clock?
The market implications of near-continuous settlement extend across several interconnected areas, and the most immediate concerns collateral mobility.
Banks and large institutions are constantly moving collateral across repo markets, derivatives positions, clearinghouses and sovereign debt bonds, and today that movement is limited by the timing of the settlement system. Collateral that cannot be repositioned on Saturday evening creates liquidity buffers that lock in capital for days, and the costs of those buffers are ultimately borne by the entire system.
Extended settlement hours, combined with the ability to use tokenized equivalents of already eligible assets as regulatory collateral with 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 implications for systemic risk are equally important. Settlement failures and overnight positions become particularly dangerous when credit conditions deteriorate rapidly, and the 2008 financial crisis was partly a settlement crisis: counterparties could not be confident that their obligations would be met on time, so they stopped trading altogether. An infrastructure capable of near-continuous atomic settlement changes that, because it compresses the window in which failures can occur.
The FCA and Bank of England are currently working with 16 firms on the live issuance and settlement of tokenized assets through the Digital Securities Sandbox, the most advanced live tokenization test environment of any G7 regulator. The sandbox will run until early 2029, with the application period expected to close around March 2027, and already hosts HM Treasury’s digital pilot tool, DIGIT.
The BoE has also committed to expanding the sandbox’s range of settlement assets to include regulated stablecoins, working towards a multi-currency system in which stablecoins, tokenized bank deposits and central bank money all operate on compatible rails.
A government conducting sovereign debt experiments on a blockchain sandbox of its own design is a fairly unequivocal statement of the regulator’s intent.
The global race that no market can afford to lose
Britain’s increasing pace on all this reflects pressure from several directions at once, and central banks arrived at these proposals by responding to a market that was growing faster than incumbents expected.
The gap between digital asset architecture and regulated financial infrastructure became so wide that it could no longer be bridged. The US has started building clearer tracks where crypto most directly intersects with mainstream finance: payment stablecoins were given a federal framework and an implementation path for banks. The EU has made MiCA an operational standard, with regulators tightening implementation deadlines and pushing companies to license widely. Singapore has built a digital asset infrastructure explicitly designed for use by institutional settlements, and the Middle East’s financial centers have been aggressive in recruiting digital asset companies with favorable regulatory frameworks.
Financial centers now appear to understand that if digital settlement infrastructure matures elsewhere first, the cost of catching up will increase with each year of delay.
The current situation in Great Britain clearly demonstrates this urgency. The Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Cryptoassets) Regulations 2026 came into force in February this year, providing the full legal framework for regulating crypto asset activities in the UK. The new regime is expected to come into effect in October 2027. Revolut’s pound stablecoin trial in the FCA’s stablecoin cohort sandbox puts the product in the spotlight of the company’s 12 million UK users, and the FCA’s selection of four companies to test stablecoin products and services, representing a range of use cases including payments, wholesale settlement and crypto trading, will feed directly into the final stablecoin rules expected later in 2026. The FCA’s broader crypto roadmap has made the regulatory pipeline much more readable for firms than even eighteen months ago, and that readability is itself a competitive signal.
The risks associated with all this are real, and the Bank’s consultations have been clear on this. Extending settlement hours introduces operational complexity and new cybersecurity risks across the participant ecosystem. The synchronization interface must be built to RTGS-level resilience standards, which is an incredibly high bar, and liquidity management over time changes the timing of reserve requirements and interest calculations in ways that have yet to be fully fleshed out.
The BoE is now seeking industry feedback on the sequence of these steps, and submissions must be submitted by July 3. Following that deadline, the Bank and the FCA committed to industry workshops, a feedback statement by the summer and a wholesale digital market roadmap by the end of the year.
For years, the only version of digital finance was one in which blockchain infrastructure developed alongside traditional markets as a parallel and largely separate system.
The Bank of England’s proposals now tell us that the era is coming to an end. Central bank infrastructure is being redesigned to integrate the architecture that digital markets first demonstrated (continuous settlement, programmable assets, atomic execution), and the process has now advanced enough that concrete timelines exist where once there were only talking points. Whether the full vision plays out five years from now or fifteen years from now, the direction is difficult to confuse.