State of play
- Today the House passed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act (GENIUS Act) (available here) with strong bipartisan support.
- The bill previously passed the Senate, and so it now heads to the president's desk to be signed into law, which President Trump has stated he intends to do quickly.
- The GENIUS Act was passed instead of a competing House-originated bill called the Stablecoin Transparency and Accountability for a Better Ledger Economy Act of 2025 (STABLE Act) (available here). We previously compared the two bills here.
- The GENIUS Act is the first major piece of crypto legislation to be passed by Congress. ─ We describe the key components of the GENIUS Act on the subsequent slides, with charts detailing the various rulemakings and reports required by the Act included on slides 20 – 27.
- A companion update focuses on the GENIUS Act's anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) and sanctions compliance provisions (available here).
Key definitions and concepts
- Payment stablecoin. A digital asset:
- that is or is designed to be used as a means of payment or settlement;
- the issuer of which:
- is obligated to convert, redeem or repurchase for a fixed amount of monetary value, not including a digital asset denominated in a fixed amount of monetary value, and
- represents that such issuer will maintain, or create the reasonable expectation that it will maintain, a stable value relative to the value of a fixed amount of monetary value; and
- that is not a national currency, deposit, or otherwise a security.
- Distributed ledger. Unclear whether an asset recorded on a private, permissioned blockchain could fall within the definition of "digital asset" or "payment stablecoin."
- Interest. A permitted payment stablecoin issuer and foreign payment stablecoin issuer cannot pay payment stablecoin holders yield or interest.
- Securities classification. Expressly states that payment stablecoins are not securities and permitted payment stablecoin issuers are not investment companies.
- Tokenized deposits. Explicitly out of scope.
Permitted federal issuers and primary regulator
| Permitted federal issuers | Primary regulator |
| Subsidiary of an IDI* | The insured depository institution's (IDI) appropriate federal banking agency |
|
Federal qualified issuer
|
Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) |
Permitted state issuers and primary regulator
| The appropriate state regulator is the primary regulator of state issuers in the GENIUS Act, with the Federal Reserve Board (FRB) or OCC having secondary authority. |
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