Chatham House: Digital Assets, Geopolitics, and the International Affairs Lens

Chatham House is one of the world’s most respected international affairs institutions, but its most famous contribution to global discourse is procedural rather than substantive: the Chatham House Rule. When a meeting is held under the Rule, participants are free to use the information discussed, but they may not identify who said what. The Rule — created at Chatham House in 1927 — is now used in policy discussions worldwide precisely because it allows candid conversation between officials who cannot speak frankly in attributable forums.

For digital asset policy, the Rule matters. Senior officials at the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, FATF, and national treasuries cannot openly express uncertainty, explore unconventional ideas, or discuss operational intelligence in public forums without creating regulatory signals they did not intend. In private Chatham House Rule discussions, the same officials can engage with the full complexity of crypto’s implications for financial crime, sanctions, and monetary sovereignty in ways that produce better policy thinking than any public speech.

The International Economics Programme

Chatham House’s digital assets work sits primarily within its International Economics Programme, which covers global financial governance, international monetary system reform, and the economic dimensions of geopolitical competition. This embedding matters: Chatham House approaches crypto not as a technology story or a financial regulation story but as an international affairs story — connected to the questions of state power, multilateral governance, and economic statecraft that dominate its broader research agenda.

The International Economics Programme’s work on digital assets has focused on three clusters: the relationship between crypto and sanctions enforcement, the implications of CBDC development for monetary sovereignty and the international monetary system, and the financial crime challenges posed by crypto’s pseudonymity and borderless architecture.

Crypto, Sanctions, and Financial Crime

Chatham House’s analysis of crypto and sanctions has been sophisticated and empirically grounded. The institution has engaged with the practical experience of sanctions against Russia, Iran, and North Korea — jurisdictions that have actively sought to use crypto to reduce the impact of financial sanctions — and produced analysis that is more nuanced than either the “crypto enables sanctions evasion” narrative or the “crypto exchanges implement sanctions screening” counter-narrative.

The honest picture from Chatham House’s analysis is that crypto occupies a middle ground. It has meaningfully enabled some sanctions evasion — particularly for North Korea’s state-sponsored hacking operations, which have used crypto to generate and move funds that replace sanctioned dollar access. It has not — at current scale and with current exchange compliance levels — enabled the systematic evasion of commodity trade sanctions at the volumes required for major economies. But the infrastructure being built — particularly multi-CBDC platforms and wholesale CBDC settlement systems — could change this calculus as volumes and capabilities scale.

The financial crime analysis has similarly resisted simplistic framings. Chatham House researchers have examined the evidence that crypto facilitates money laundering, finding that while crypto is used in some money laundering schemes, its transparent on-chain transaction record actually makes it more traceable than cash for investigators with appropriate blockchain analytics capabilities. The policy implication is not that crypto is harmless but that effective financial crime enforcement requires investment in blockchain analytics capabilities at law enforcement agencies, not merely regulatory restrictions on crypto access.

Monetary Sovereignty and the CBDC Race

Chatham House’s contribution to the CBDC debate has been to connect it explicitly to monetary sovereignty — the ability of states to control the monetary environment within their borders and to use monetary and financial policy as instruments of state power.

The monetary sovereignty framing cuts in two directions. For advanced economies like the UK, the concern is whether private stablecoins or foreign CBDCs could achieve significant domestic adoption in ways that reduce the central bank’s monetary policy effectiveness. The Bank of England’s work on the digital pound — and the Treasury’s caution about its design — has been influenced by Chatham House-adjacent analysis about the risks of a retail CBDC that could too easily substitute for commercial bank deposits.

For developing economies — where Chatham House’s work extends through its international affairs mandate — the monetary sovereignty concern is about crypto dollarisation: the adoption of dollar-pegged private stablecoins in economies with weak domestic currencies, which effectively imports US monetary policy without US political accountability. This framing, echoing UNCTAD’s analysis, has been a consistent theme in Chatham House events that connect international economics researchers with developing country central bank officials.

London as Policy Bridge

Chatham House’s location in St James’s Square, London, gives it a geographic advantage in bridging the US and European policy conversations that its Washington counterparts cannot easily replicate. London remains the world’s largest forex market, a major crypto hub despite Brexit complications, and the location of the Bank of England, the FCA, and significant numbers of international financial institution staff.

This positioning allows Chatham House to convene discussions that genuinely bring together US Treasury perspectives, EU Commission approaches, Bank of England thinking, and perspectives from major emerging market central banks — conversations that are harder to arrange in Washington or Brussels. The neutral-ground quality of London in international financial policy discussions is an asset that Chatham House uses effectively.

The practical implication for crypto policy practitioners is that Chatham House events — both published proceedings and the private discussions that inform them — are among the better windows into the actual views of senior financial regulators and policymakers who cannot express those views in official public communications.