FCA picks Revolut for stablecoin issuance from field of 20 applicants
Revolut has spent much of the past year collecting banking licenses instead of just polishing its banking app — and the reason behind that push is becoming clearer. In February, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority picked Revolut for the stablecoins cohort of its regulatory sandbox, one of only four firms chosen from twenty applicants. That selection puts Revolut stablecoin issuance on a concrete regulatory track for the first time, and it signals that Europe’s most valuable private fintech wants to stop renting the pipes that move its customers’ money and start owning them outright.
Key takeaways
- The FCA selected Revolut in February for its stablecoins regulatory sandbox, one of four firms chosen from twenty applicants, to test a sterling-pegged stablecoin.
- Revolut secured a full UK banking license in March 2026, holds an EU banking license, and has filed for a US bank charter — the regulatory groundwork needed to issue and back its own coin.
- Nel corso dell’anno terminato a dicembre 2025, Revolut ha raggiunto ricavi pari a $6 miliardi, in crescita rispetto ai $4 miliardi del 2024, mentre l’utile netto è salito a $1.7 miliardi e customer base of 68.3 million.
- PayPal’s PYUSD, launched in August 2023, had expanded to 70 markets by March 2026, showing how quickly a rival stablecoin can scale once live.
- The Bank of England has since softened its original sterling stablecoin proposals, swapping planned per-person holding caps for a £40 billion issuance guardrail and lowering the unremunerated reserve requirement from 40% to 30%.
Revolut’s Entry into the FCA Stablecoins Sandbox
Revolut’s sandbox slot is a testing ground, not a launch, but it tells a clear story: the company believes the next decade of payments revenue lives on the settlement layer it doesn’t yet control. The FCA’s own filing describes the experiment in plain terms — a GBP-denominated stablecoin pegged one-to-one to sterling and backed by pound reserve assets, built for customers to buy, hold, sell and move inside the Revolut app before sending it out across public crypto networks.
… Continue reading the full article at the original source below.
