The Bank of England reaffirmed its position that it will not rush to issue a digital pound.

On Oct. 12, blockchain outlet Cryptopolitan reported that the Bank of England plans to decide this year whether to push ahead with a digital pound, but said it does not need a central bank digital currency (CBDC) for now.

Deputy Governor Sarah Breeden (사라 브리든) said there is no reason for the central bank to rush a digital pound given the fast pace of innovation in digital payments. It judges that commercial stablecoins and tokenised bank deposits can replace the payment gap the digital pound was meant to fill.

The Bank of England is placing particular weight on fostering the pound-denominated stablecoin market. It aims to prevent British households and companies from moving to dollar-pegged stablecoins as they use new payment services. As of the end of 2025, the value of pound-denominated stablecoins was less than $6 million, a negligible share of the overall market worth $308 billion.

The Bank of England and the UK Treasury plan to complete the digital pound design phase by the end of 2026. In a progress report released on March 4, the bank said it would draw up a detailed blueprint based on experiment results from the Digital Pound Lab and input from industry and civil society. The two institutions then plan to decide, after a joint assessment, whether to keep pursuing payment modernisation through a digital pound. Against that backdrop, Breeden's message that there is "no reason to rush" is seen as reflecting the internal mood at the Bank of England.

In contrast, work to establish a stablecoin framework is moving faster than the digital pound. On June 22, 2026, the Bank of England issued a policy statement and draft supervisory rules for systemically important pound-denominated stablecoin issuers. The policy scrapped an existing proposed holding limit and set a temporary issuance guardrail of 40 billion pounds per coin. Issuers can hold up to 70 percent of reserve assets in short-term UK government bonds, while the remaining 30 percent must be deposited at the Bank of England without interest.

It also detailed redemption rules. Redemptions must be processed within 24 hours, and paying interest to holders is banned. The Bank of England has effectively written private stablecoin rules ahead of any decision on a digital pound.

Experiments to gauge the digital pound's practical use are also continuing. The Bank of England's Digital Pound Lab is conducting a cross-border trade finance test with Polygon Labs, Novo Finance and Dun & Bradstreet. The experiment focuses on whether stablecoins and a simulated digital pound can handle different payment stages of the same transaction.

The lab said it is not using real funds or real customers and drew a line that the experiment does not mean it will lead to a decision to issue a digital pound. Applications for the lab's second phase closed at the end of March 2026.

As a result, Britain's digital payments strategy is increasingly likely to place more weight, for the time being, on stablecoin institutionalisation and use-case experiments than on a CBDC. A joint decision by the Bank of England and the Treasury due later this year is expected to be a turning point for whether to proceed with a digital pound.