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
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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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