Soda Labs

Basel Committee, SCO60

Bank capital · the sharpest traceability rule anywhere

Regulator or standard-setterGlobalRestricts anonymity

Anonymity-enhancing assets or unattributed transfers are barred outright, or barred for regulated firms.

What Basel Committee, SCO60 actually says

The single most privacy-restrictive sentence in global financial regulation is probably here. To qualify for the favourable capital treatment, a network must be well-defined such that all transactions and participants are traceable. A chain that obscures the transaction graph cannot satisfy it. Worth being precise about what this does and does not mean: it binds banks, not protocols, and sets a capital cost rather than a legality question. But the effect is that permissionless-chain assets fall into Group 2, capped at 2% of Tier 1 capital, which is why bank balance sheets stay away. The standard itself concedes the Committee will keep reflecting on whether those risks can be mitigated enough for Group 1. A targeted review is under way; nobody has said whether it touches the traceability condition.

The instruments that matter

SCO60.17(2), classification condition 3
all key elements of the network must be well-defined such that all transactions and participants are traceable
Group 2 cap
exposures capped at 2% of Tier 1 capital, which is where permissionless-chain assets land
Took effect 1 January 2026
deferred once from 2025; the industry request for a further delay in August 2025 was not granted
Targeted review expedited November 2025
endorsed by GHOS on 9 March 2026, with an update due before end-2026; its scope is not public

What this means for confidential transactions

Bubble is built for exactly this shape of obligation: amounts and balances live on chain as ciphertexts, computation happens without decryption, and the only disclosure path is an on-chain access list through which an authorized party - an auditor, a supervisor, a counterparty - can request scoped decryption. That is confidentiality from the public, not from the regulator.

Compliant by default.

See how selective disclosure satisfies a supervisor without publishing your book to the world.