The Financial Stability Board has told G20 finance ministers that it monitors the global stablecoin market, now worth $300 billion, largely through private data compilers rather than official statistics, and that no national regulatory framework for stablecoins has yet been tested under severe stress.
The admission came in a five-page note delivered on October 12, ahead of a G20 finance ministers' meeting on October 15. It was accompanied by a letter from Andrew Bailey, the FSB chair and Governor of the Bank of England, who addressed the group directly on the topic.
According to the note, the stablecoin market has remained practically unchanged in size over the past year, with 99% of it tied to the US dollar. Tether, which relocated its headquarters to El Salvador in January 2025, and USDC, issued by Circle in the United States and by its French subsidiary for Europe, dominate the sector, though the FSB's note names no issuers directly.
The data gap described by the FSB is structural rather than incidental. The note states that an issuer "may not know who holds its liabilities, where those holders are domiciled, or sometimes where the redemption request will materialize." Stability, the FSB warns, depends on "the mobility of reserves, market access, information flows and coordination, which can break down in times of stress," meaning a stablecoin could become "systemic at a lower usage threshold" than conventional financial instruments.
The FSB also flags a regulatory arbitrage concern, pointing to "some issuers choosing to set up in less regulated or unregulated jurisdictions." While it acknowledges that the sector "generates abundant data," the note says authorities "rely mainly on private compilers," which creates "comparability and credibility risks" because verification work is "largely carried out by the industry" itself. In several cases, the FSB says, independent confirmation "is often not possible" and reported figures mean "this may not be verifiable."
No new rules, three workstreams proposed
The FSB is not issuing new recommendations. Its 2023 guidance remains the reference framework, and no date has been fixed for a follow-up report. Instead, the note proposes three workstreams: developing common metrics covering secondary market depth, geographic distribution of holdings, redemptions and reserves; making better use of existing data through cross-border cooperation among authorities; and establishing data collection best practices in coordination with industry.
The note lands alongside two other developments relevant to the sector's oversight. The International Monetary Fund published a stablecoin flow panel covering 188 countries ten days before the FSB note was sent. In the United States, a public consultation on application rules under the GENIUS Act closed on October 19.
For European regulators implementing MiCA, the FSB's core message is that even after years of supervisory attention, the underlying data infrastructure for stablecoins remains thin, and the resilience of any national regime, including the EU's, has not been "tested in a situation of severe stress."
