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.
Related entries
- Egmont GroupGlobal · How financial intelligence crosses borders
- FATFGlobal · The source of almost every travel rule on earth
- OECD CARFGlobal · Tax reporting · the fastest-moving instrument in this section
- BIS Innovation HubGlobal · Central bank prototypes that build privacy on purpose
- Convention 108+Global · The only binding international data protection treaty
- Financial Stability BoardGlobal · Financial stability · and explicitly not the privacy body
Compliant by default.
See how selective disclosure satisfies a supervisor without publishing your book to the world.