Bhutan has cleared a new central bank to hold cryptocurrency in its reserves. A Royal Decree from King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck elevated the Gelephu Financial Services Office into the autonomous Gelephu Central Bank (GCB). As Crypto Briefing first reported, the decree permits the bank, which serves the Gelephu Mindfulness City (GMC) special administrative region in southern Bhutan, to invest in digital and cryptocurrency assets as part of its reserve portfolio. The decree was signed on 1-2 November 2026, though that date rests on the single report and no official decree text has surfaced.
A reserve mandate, not a treasury trade
The distinction that matters for reserve watchers is legal form. A corporate or municipal treasury that buys Bitcoin makes a discretionary balance-sheet bet; it can be reversed by a board, and it answers to shareholders. The GCB sits in the opposite position: it manages monetary policy, oversees foreign reserves and supervises the financial institutions operating in the city, and its reserve behaviour is governed by a royal instrument. Holding crypto is reportedly optional, the stated aim is to strengthen the bank’s liquidity and accountability policies, and no allocation has been confirmed. Nothing in the decree obliges the bank to buy a single satoshi, and no holdings have been disclosed.
That still places the GCB in rare company. Central banks with explicit statutory permission to hold digital assets are close to unheard of. For FX traders the signal is institutional rather than positional: a jurisdiction is writing digital assets into the legal architecture of reserve management, the same layer that governs gold and foreign exchange.
The anchor asset is already in place
The decree does not start from nothing. In December 2025, GMC received a pledge of up to 10,000 BTC drawn from Bhutan’s national holdings, giving the new bank a potential reserve asset before it has exercised its new powers. Readers following how regulators are testing stablecoin reserve rules elsewhere can compare this with the ECB’s push to revise MiCA’s stablecoin reserve requirements.
One further clause is worth tracking. The GCB may eventually issue its own currency, potentially in digital form, though that step requires royal approval and carries no timeline. The Bank of Korea’s work on a forex law amendment covering stablecoins shows other central banks approaching the same territory through payment law rather than decree.
What happens next depends on the bank itself: whether the GCB discloses any digital asset holdings, and at what size, will be the first hard number to arrive.
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Saqib Iqbal
