A quiet but consequential deadline passed this month: the FCA’s consultation on a market-abuse regime for cryptoassets closed on 10 August 2026. Consultations are the unglamorous machinery of UK regulation — the regulator publishes proposals, the industry writes in, and the final rules emerge somewhere downstream — but this one deserves attention, because market abuse is where crypto regulation stops being about paperwork and starts being about how trading actually behaves.
In plain English, a market-abuse regime is the rulebook against rigging the game. In traditional UK markets it covers three broad sins: insider dealing (trading on information the rest of the market doesn’t have), unlawful disclosure (leaking that information), and market manipulation (creating a false impression of supply, demand or price). The consultation concerned how rules of that kind should apply to cryptoassets — a market where, to date, much of that conduct has sat outside the FCA’s reach, however unattractive it looked.
That “reach” question is the other half of the story. The FCA has said a policy statement on the perimeter — the boundary line of what the regulator actually regulates — is expected in September. Per the regulator, that statement will help settle which cryptoasset activities fall inside the new regime, which is the unglamorous prerequisite for everything else: you cannot police abuse in a market you have not yet drawn a line around.
What should a UK reader take from this? Mostly that the direction of travel is unchanged: cryptoassets are being brought inside the UK’s regulatory perimeter piece by piece, and the pieces are now arriving on a published schedule rather than a speculative one. What nobody should take from it is comfort in the present tense. A consultation that closed in August is not a rule in force today, and a policy statement expected in September is a promise of clarity, not clarity itself. As of this writing, the rules governing abuse in crypto markets remain a work in progress — which is precisely why the regulator keeps repeating, and we keep relaying, that consumers should treat this market as largely unprotected until told otherwise.
We’ll read the September policy statement when it lands and translate it here.
The standing reminder from this desk: crypto assets are high risk, none of this is financial advice, and no consultation paper does your research for you.