The SEC Just Quietly Made Stablecoins Real Money on Wall Street

While everyone was busy watching Bitcoin flirt with $68,000 and arguing about tariffs, the SEC dropped what might be the most consequential crypto policy shift of 2026 so far. And they did it by editing an FAQ page.

Yeah, really. An FAQ.

What Actually Happened

The SEC updated its "Broker Dealer Financial Responsibilities" FAQ to add a new question: what kind of haircut should broker-dealers take on stablecoin holdings? The answer: just 2%.

That means firms like Robinhood, Goldman Sachs, and every other SEC-registered broker-dealer can now count 98% of their stablecoin holdings — USDC, USDT, you name it — as regulatory capital. Before this change, many firms were applying a 100% haircut, effectively zeroing out stablecoins on their balance sheets. Holding them was literally a financial penalty.

That penalty is now gone.

Why This Is Massive

Stablecoins are now treated like money market funds. As Tonya Evans, a crypto education leader and DCG board member, put it: stablecoins just got the same balance-sheet treatment as one of the most trusted instruments in traditional finance.

It unlocks tokenized securities. Broker-dealers couldn't easily custody tokenized assets or provide liquidity for on-chain trading when holding stablecoins was a capital drain. Now they can. This is the infrastructure layer that tokenized finance has been waiting for.

Every major brokerage is affected. Larry Florio, deputy general counsel at Ethena Labs, nailed it: "Everywhere from Robinhood to Goldman Sachs run on these calculations." When you change the capital math, you change what businesses are economically viable. Stablecoins just became working capital.

The SEC's Stealth Approach

This is part of what the SEC has been calling "Project Crypto" — a series of policy changes rolled out not through formal rulemaking but through staff guidance, FAQ updates, and industry correspondence. Commissioner Hester Peirce, who runs the Crypto Task Force, issued a statement saying the change will "make it feasible for broker-dealers to engage in a broader range of business activities relating to tokenized securities and other crypto assets."

There's a catch, though. Informal guidance is as easy to reverse as it is to issue. It doesn't carry the legal weight of a formal rule. The SEC has been working on actual crypto rules for months, but rulemaking is slow — we're talking months to years.

So yes, this is bullish. But it's also fragile.

The Bigger Picture

This change didn't happen in a vacuum. The Supreme Court just ruled Trump's tariffs illegal, Bitcoin shrugged off the noise and pushed toward $68K, and there are signs of stress in private credit markets (Blue Owl Capital dropped 15% this week after liquidating $1.4B in assets). Traditional finance is showing cracks while crypto infrastructure is getting legitimized.

The stablecoin market is already over $180 billion. When you make it easier for every brokerage in America to hold and use stablecoins as working capital, you're building a bridge between TradFi and DeFi that didn't exist before.

Our Take

This is the kind of quiet, boring policy change that actually moves markets over the long term. It won't pump your bags tomorrow, but six months from now when Goldman is settling tokenized bonds through stablecoin rails, remember where it started: an FAQ update on a Thursday night.

The SEC is essentially saying: stablecoins are real money. Act accordingly.

Not financial advice. DYOR.