US lawmakers’ quest for ways to regulate stablecoin issuers could revive interest in ‘narrow banks’, which place customer funds purely with the Federal Reserve, and benefit from a slimmed-down regulatory regime to reflect the very low-risk business model. The trouble is, the Fed never liked the idea in the first place.

A draft bill proposed by Senator Pat Toomey, a senior Republican lawmaker, would authorise the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to license and regulate stablecoin