GENIUS Act Moves To The President's Desk

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 state issuers and primary regulator

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