(Bloomberg) -- The body overseeing the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision endorsed global prudential standards for banks’ exposure to crypto assets, seeking to counter threats from virtual coins.

The backing from the Group of Central Bank Governors and Heads of Supervision is an important step toward “mitigating risks to banks” from digital tokens, Tiff Macklem, chair of the oversight body and governor of the Bank of Canada, said in a statement on Dec. 16.

The standards outline two groups of crypto assets — one for tokens that fully meet a set of conditions and another for coins that fail to meet any of them. 

The first group is subject to capital requirements as set out in the existing Basel Framework. For group two crypto assets, a bank’s total exposure must not exceed 2% of Tier 1 capital and should generally be lower than 1%.

The chaotic bankruptcy of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto empire, which may have left more than a million creditors, has injected urgency into regulatory efforts to curb risks from the digital-asset industry.

The Financial Stability Oversight Council in the US said last week that interconnections between crypto firms and traditional financial institutions remain limited while adding that entanglements could rapidly increase and put the broader system at risk.

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