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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) just made a quiet but very important change 🏛️

Before this update, if a regulated broker-dealer in the U.S. held stablecoins, regulators basically treated them as if they were worth zero for capital requirement purposes. That’s what a 100% “haircut” means ✂️

If a firm held $100 million in stablecoins, regulators counted it as $0 when calculating how financially strong that firm was 😬

Now, that haircut has been reduced to just 2%.

So instead of $100 counting as $0, it now counts as $98 toward required capital 💰

That’s a massive shift.

Why does this matter? 🤔

Broker-dealers must meet strict net capital rules. If an asset gets a 100% haircut, it becomes expensive and inefficient to hold. Firms avoided stablecoins not necessarily because they didn’t trust them — but because regulators made it costly to keep them on balance sheets 📉

With only a 2% haircut, qualifying “payment stablecoins” are now treated much more like low-risk assets, similar to money market funds 🏦

This change came through guidance from the SEC’s Division of Trading and Markets. Commissioner Hester Peirce signaled that the previous 100% treatment was too harsh, especially for stablecoins that are fully backed and meet regulatory standards ⚖️

In practical terms, this could:

• Make it easier for regulated firms to use stablecoins for settlement 🔄

• Encourage institutional adoption 🏢

• Reduce friction between traditional finance and on-chain systems 🔗

• Support tokenized securities and digital asset trading 📊

Important detail ⚠️: This applies to “qualifying payment stablecoins” — generally USD-denominated coins that are fully backed and meet disclosure and regulatory requirements.

So while it doesn’t change stablecoins themselves, it changes how traditional financial institutions can interact with them.

And in finance, small percentage changes like this can quietly unlock very big shifts 🚀