The Financial Stability Board (FSB) published its peer review of Türkiye on 11 November 2026, and its main finding on Turkey’s stablecoin regulation is blunt: the country now licenses crypto exchanges, but it still has no rules for the companies that issue stablecoins, even though Turkish users hold dollar tokens such as USDT to protect their savings against the lira. The FSB recommends issuer requirements and tighter conditions for foreign-issued, foreign-currency stablecoins sold through Turkish platforms. The report is not binding, sets no deadline and carries no sanction.
Some crypto outlets presented the report as pressure on Ankara to lock down foreign stablecoins. The text is more measured. It credits the authorities with “meaningful progress” in recent years, records the Turkish authorities’ view that their stablecoin exposure is modest, and states that for the payments route “policy direction and timing have not yet been set”. Turkey has not published a response or a timetable.
What the FSB published on 11 November
The document is the second FSB peer review of Türkiye. The first, in 2015, looked at macroprudential policy and bank resolution. This one examines how far Turkey has gone in applying the FSB’s 2023 recommendations for crypto-asset activities and for global stablecoin arrangements, known in the report as the CA and GSC recommendations. Turkey volunteered for the review. The analysis reflects information as of August 2026 and was discussed in the FSB’s Standing Committee on Standards Implementation in September.
A team chaired by Sebastián Sánchez Sarmiento of the Central Bank of Argentina drafted it, with members from the Saudi Central Bank, the World Bank, the European Central Bank, the Banca d’Italia and the Reserve Bank of India. The FSB press release carries no quote from an official. The FSB charter, quoted in the front matter of the full report (PDF), says its decisions do not create legal rights or obligations.
The FSB also frames the review as a case study for emerging and developing economies, noting that adoption incentives are strongest in economies with unstable currencies and less developed financial systems. Peer authorities facing the same dollar demand are the intended readers of its stablecoin chapter.
A large retail market with a small regulated core
Citing Chainalysis data, the report says Turkey handled nearly $200 billion in crypto transactions in 2025, which placed it among the 20 largest crypto markets in the world and first in the Middle East and North Africa. Official figures tell a smaller story: the Crypto Asset Central Registry System (KVMKS), operated under the Capital Markets Board (CMB) with the central securities depository MKK, counts about $3 billion of crypto holdings in 2026, roughly 0.3% of banking-sector assets. That figure leaves out self-custody wallets and platforms based abroad.
| Indicator (FSB peer review) | Figure |
|---|---|
| Annual crypto transactions, 2025 (Chainalysis) | nearly $200 billion |
| Crypto accounts at local platforms | over 7.1 million (5.3 million entities) |
| Accounts with a positive balance | 51% |
| Holdings registered in KVMKS, 2026 | about $3 billion (about 0.3% of bank assets) |
| Daily crypto trading volume | about $0.5 billion (Borsa Istanbul: $3.9 billion, 2025) |
| Largest holdings at local platforms | bitcoin 18%, ether 11%, XRP 9%, USDT 7% |
| BiLira (TRYB), the only domestic stablecoin | market cap about $5.9 million |
| Share of 2025 on-chain transactions in dollar stablecoins | 17% (3% for other stablecoins and tokenised assets) |
Holdings at local platforms are spread across 1,500 different assets. The market shares depend on who counts: supervisory data give BtcTurk 29%, with Midas and Binance TR at 19% each, while CoinDesk on-chain data for the first quarter of 2026, quoted in the report, credit Binance’s global platform with about 70% and BtcTurk with 18%.
The stablecoin use cases are described in two ways. Some users hold dollar tokens as a store of value against lira depreciation and inflation. Others buy dollar stablecoins, primarily USDT, and move them to foreign platforms offering leverage and derivatives; Turkish platforms are limited to spot trading. Official data on peer-to-peer use are not available, the report says, and evidence of stablecoins in everyday merchant payments remains limited. Our guide to stablecoins as dollar access in emerging markets covers the same pattern in Nigeria, Egypt and Kenya.
Turkey stablecoin regulation: exchanges licensed since 2024, issuers still uncovered
The exchange side moved quickly on paper. In July 2024, legal amendments brought crypto services into the Capital Markets Law and gave the CMB authority over crypto-asset service providers. Between March and June 2025 the CMB opened a three-month application window and published a list of “Actively Operating” platforms allowed to continue during the transition. The first on-site inspections were completed by October 2025, and weekly KVMKS reporting started in early 2026.
Licensing then slowed. The CMB extended the authorisation deadlines at the end of March 2026, citing a shortage of custodians and a backlog of IT audits. By late June 2026, six banks had preliminary approvals from the banking supervisor BRSA to offer crypto custody and the CMB had deemed three of them “suitable”. Market participants told the reviewers that three banks had since received CMB custody licences, but none had started the service. Platforms may hold at most 5% of client crypto in their own wallets, with the rest at an authorised custodian; intraday the platform share can reach 10%.
Stablecoins got no tailored rules in that process. They are treated like any other crypto-asset for sale, trading and custody. On top of that sit transfer limits of $3,000 a day and $50,000 a month for crypto-to-crypto stablecoin transfers, with time-bound exceptions, mostly for companies, approved by each platform’s board after enhanced due diligence. The report calls them MASAK’s transaction-level limits, after the financial crimes investigation board.
The FSB names two gaps. There is no issuance framework, so issuers follow general capital markets rules and platforms judge compliance. And there are no listing requirements specific to stablecoins, in the report’s words “addressing stabilisation mechanisms, reserve transparency, or peg history”. Banks, it adds, are reluctant to open accounts linked to stablecoin activity.
Payments are a separate tangle. A 2021 central bank regulation bans the use of crypto-assets in payments. A recent amendment to the central bank’s e-money regulation (No. 31676) lets certain currency-pegged stablecoins be treated as equivalent to e-money, a possible route into payments, but the implementing rules have not been issued. The report says unregulated crypto payment gateways are already approaching online merchants, based on anecdotal evidence.
What Recommendation 4 asks Turkey to do
The review makes five recommendations. The stablecoin one, Recommendation 4, has two parts. The first asks Turkey to set issuer requirements for fiat-referenced stablecoins, covering redemption rights, stabilisation mechanisms and prudential rules, to clarify how those tokens fit with payments and e-money law, and to keep safeguards against foreign-currency stablecoins being used in domestic payments.
The second part concerns the tokens Turks actually use. It asks for stronger measures on the distribution and circulation of “foreign issued, foreign currency-denominated stablecoins” through Turkish platforms, with targeted expectations on stabilisation, reserve composition and transparency, and “enhanced cooperation with an issuer’s home authority”. Elsewhere the report says the rules should be differentiated by currency of denomination and should spell out the duties of local intermediaries when the issuer is offshore.
What it would mean for exchanges listing USDT or USDC in Turkey
Local exchanges are what the FSB calls the “primary regulated entry point” for foreign stablecoins, so any new rule would land on them first. In its detailed section the report lists the checks it has in mind: peg stability, reserve composition, attestations and audits, weighed against the regulatory regime that applies to the issuer in its home country. In practice the burden would fall on the platforms to document each foreign dollar token they list. The report names no token or issuer in its recommendations and does not say whether any listing would have to end. For a refresher on how the two largest dollar tokens differ, see our USDT vs USDC explainer.
The cooperation point is concrete. Turkey has no cross-border cooperation arrangement specific to stablecoins, and the report says this gap is not covered by bilateral arrangements with the home regulators of the foreign issuers whose tokens circulate in Turkey. Separately, MASAK has set up a direct communication and cooperation channel with Tether (USDT) for anti-money-laundering information sharing and asset freezes. That channel runs to the issuer itself, not to its supervisor. The FSB also flags an asymmetry: the CMB belongs to IOSCO’s information-sharing agreement, while the central bank, the likely regulator of fiat-pegged stablecoins, does not.
Ankara’s view: stablecoin exposure is “modest”
The Turkish position appears only through the report. The authorities “currently view domestic exposures to stablecoins as modest”, it says, and the central bank and BRSA consider the risk channels limited given the size of the crypto market and its links to banks. They also list what could go wrong if adoption grows: more demand for foreign currency, currency substitution, capital-flow swings and pressure on bank funding.
The other recommendations ask Turkey to keep implementing the FSB framework in full, to build financial stability indicators fed by both on-chain and off-chain data, to finish moving platforms from interim registration to full licences on a published schedule, and to keep reviewing its cooperation agreements at home and abroad. The FSB also wants a fresh look at banks’ crypto exposures, since the BRSA has decided not to apply the Basel Committee’s crypto standard, known as SCO60.
Europe already chose a harder line on foreign stablecoins
For EU readers, the contrast is sharp. Under MiCA, a stablecoin offered in the EU needs an authorised issuer, and on 8 October 2026 the European Securities and Markets Authority told licensed firms to stop serving EU clients in non-compliant stablecoins, with existing positions to be resolved within three months. That gives an outer limit of about 8 January 2027, as we reported in our piece on ESMA’s non-MiCA stablecoin deadline. Turkey, by comparison, still lets foreign dollar tokens trade on licensed platforms with no listing standard at all.
The EU has its own version of the home-authority problem. In Recommendation ESRB/2025/9 of 20 October 2025, the European Systemic Risk Board said joint issuance of stablecoins by an EU entity and a non-EU partner should not be considered permitted under MiCA, asked the Commission to clarify this by the end of 2025, and set out fallback safeguards, most of them due by the end of 2026. Brussels and Ankara face the same question here: who supervises a token issued abroad and sold to local savers.
Other emerging markets are moving at different speeds. Nigeria’s central bank now requires a local licence for every dollar stablecoin. At the global level, the FSB told the G20 last month that stablecoin supervisors still rely on private data and that no run has yet tested the rules.
No date for a Turkish stablecoin law
Nothing in the report is dated. The FSB follows up its peer reviews, but this one sets no deadline. Three items remain open on the Turkish side: the central bank’s implementing rules for stablecoins treated as e-money, the end of the transitional regime for exchanges and custodians, and any law for stablecoin issuers. The report does not say whether Turkey plans such a law or when.
Until one of those steps is taken, the rules that bind Turkish holders of USDT are the ones already in force: the payments ban, the $3,000 daily and $50,000 monthly transfer caps, and the platform licensing regime still in transition.