Stablecoin as Cash: The Three Criteria to Check Your Balance Yourself

A stablecoin promises in its name what it only has to prove when things get difficult: a stable value, redeemable at any time. Until now there was no sober benchmark against which you could measure that promise. Since 18 August 2026 there is one, and it comes from a corner where nobody would have gone looking for investor protection: accounting. The US Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has published a proposal setting out when a digital asset may be carried as a cash equivalent on a corporate balance sheet at all. The proposal names three conditions, and a token has to meet all three at the same time. None of these rules applies to you as a private investor. The test behind them is nevertheless the best that is currently publicly available, because it asks the right question: who owes you your money back, how quickly, and what is it paid out of? This article turns the three conditions into a checklist you can apply to any stablecoin balance sitting on your exchange or in your wallet right now. Where your balance is held matters too: the comparison of regulated crypto exchanges shows which providers are supervised in the EU and what obligations follow from that. What the F...