GENIUS Act Rules 2026: OCC, Fed, FDIC and Treasury Timeline

Anyone in Washington whose job is to read stablecoin rules has had a heavy autumn. The OCC's main proposal runs to 376 pages. The Federal Reserve added two companion proposals on 29 September 2026. Treasury published an interim final rule the next day, and its proposal on what counts as "offering" a stablecoin in the United States closes for comments on 19 October. Fourteen months after President Trump signed the GENIUS Act, the law is being turned into actual rulebooks, and it is running late.

This piece maps where each agency stands as of mid-October 2026, what the draft rules actually require, and which dates matter between now and July 2028. For the statute itself and how it compares with Europe, see our earlier explainer on GENIUS Act and MiCA stablecoin rules.

The statute in five numbers

The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act became Public Law 119-27 on 18 July 2025, after passing the Senate 68-30 on 17 June and the House 308-122 on 17 July, according to the Congressional Research Service. Five numbers do most of the work:

• 1:1 reserves. Every payment stablecoin must be backed at least dollar for dollar by cash, insured deposits, Treasury bills, Treasury-backed repos, government money market funds and similar assets.
• 93 days. Treasury securities in the reserve must mature in 93 days or less, as Fenwick's summary of the Act sets out.
• $10 billion. Non-bank issuers below this outstanding amount can choose a certified state regime. Above it, they move under federal supervision.
• $50 billion. Issuers above this level must publish annual audited financial statements.
• 18 months. The Act takes effect on the earlier of 18 months after enactment (18 January 2027) or 120 days after regulators finish their rules.

The law also told regulators to write their rules within a year. That deadline was 18 July 2026, and seven federal agencies missed it, as coverage of Treasury's first binding rule noted. Missing it has no legal penalty. What it changes is the order of events: the effective date is now almost certainly the fixed 18 January 2027 backstop, not a date set by finished rules.

Who is writing which rule

GENIUS spreads the work across the agencies that already supervise banks, credit unions and money flows. The table below is the scorecard as of 15 October 2026, drawn from Morgan Lewis's tracker, Arnold & Porter's review of the Fed proposals and the Federal Register.

The pattern is clear. The OCC carries the heaviest load because it supervises every non-bank federal issuer, and it is the only agency that has publicly committed to a final rule date. The Fed was last to publish, which matters because its proposals cover large state-chartered issuers once they cross $10 billion.

What the OCC wants: reserves, redemption and capital

The OCC's proposal was approved on 25 February 2026 and published on 2 March. It is the template others are following, and its detail is where the business models get decided.

On reserves, the OCC offered two options. Under Option A, a safe harbour checked every business day, an issuer would keep at least 10% of reserves in demand deposits or money at a Federal Reserve Bank, at least 30% in that form or in assets that come due within five business days, no more than 40% at any one bank, and a weighted average maturity of 20 days or less. Option B would make those benchmarks mandatory. Issuers with at least $25 billion outstanding would also hold at least 0.5% of reserves, capped at $500 million, as insured deposits, according to Gibson Dunn's analysis.

Redemption must generally happen within two business days. If requests exceed 10% of outstanding coins within 24 hours, the issuer can stretch that to seven calendar days, provided it tells the OCC within a day. Capital starts at the greater of $5 million or whatever the approval order says, and the OCC itself signals that a viable business probably needs $6.05 million to $25 million.

The yield ban is where the real fight sits, because it decides who gets paid for the float.

The OCC also writes the statutory ban on paying "any form of interest or yield" for simply holding a stablecoin into rule text, with a rebuttable presumption that affiliate or third-party reward schemes that mimic interest are caught too. Exchanges that share reserve income with users through partner programmes are the obvious target. For how that income is earned in the first place, see how stablecoin issuers make money.

The Fed's late entry and its capital formula

The Fed's two proposals, published in the Federal Register on 29 September 2026 under Docket R-1899, cover subsidiaries of insured state member banks and uninsured state-chartered institutions with $10 billion or more outstanding. They mirror the OCC on 1:1 segregated reserves and two-day redemption, and add a tiered operational-risk capital charge that is easy to model.

Worked example: capital for a $60 billion issuer

Take a hypothetical Fed-supervised issuer with $60 billion in circulation and average non-reserve revenue (fees, services) of $200 million a year over three years. Under the proposed formula:

• 2.0% on the first $20 billion: $400 million
• 1.5% on the next $30 billion: $450 million
• 1.0% on the remaining $10 billion: $100 million
• 25% of $200 million non-reserve revenue: $50 million

That totals about $1.0 billion of operational-risk capital, roughly 1.7% of outstanding coins, before any separate 2% charge on uninsured deposit exposure in the reserve. If the same issuer earned 4% on its $60 billion reserve, gross income would be around $2.4 billion a year, so the capital ask is meaningful but not crippling. A smaller issuer at $5 billion would face about $100 million plus its revenue add-on, which is a far larger bite relative to income. This is a stylised illustration of a proposal, not a forecast; issuers should take advice on the final rule.

The Fed also proposes a 12-month exam cycle, weekly confidential reports and quarterly financial reports. Where a bank owns the issuer, the bank would deduct the subsidiary's minimum capital from its own CET1, dollar for dollar. That deduction may quietly steer large banks toward tokenised deposits instead of a separate stablecoin subsidiary.

State versus federal: the $10 billion line

The state route is where the politics live. Treasury's 3 April principles say state regimes can differ in form and procedure but must be "substantially similar" in substance. Its 30 September interim final rule then set up the procedure for the Stablecoin Certification Review Committee, chaired by Treasury with the heads of the Fed and FDIC, to certify states. States must win initial certification by 18 January 2028 and recertify every year, though the committee cannot accept filings until the Office of Management and Budget clears the paperwork.

Once a state-licensed issuer crosses $10 billion, the OCC's draft gives it five business days to notify, 270 days to complete a capital analysis and 360 days to move to federal oversight, win a waiver or stop new issuance. In practice the state lane is for smaller and regional issuers. Circle, with USDC at roughly $73 billion as of October 2026, is already on the federal track: it received conditional OCC approval for a national trust bank on 12 December 2025 alongside Ripple, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets and Paxos, and final approval in July 2026. Notably, USDC issuance itself is slated to sit in a New York limited-purpose trust company, with reserve management at the national bank a later step.

Foreign issuers: the door is drawn but not built

For readers outside the US, the most consequential text is Treasury's 18 August proposal on issuance, offer and sale. It treats a stablecoin as issued in the US if either the issuer or the recipient is located there, and it counts answering an unsolicited US inquiry as an offer. That removes the reverse-solicitation comfort that many offshore platforms rely on in other US regimes, as Freshfields points out.

A foreign payment stablecoin issuer can reach US users through a platform only if Treasury first finds its home regime comparable, and the issuer registers with the OCC, accepts US enforcement and holds enough reserves at a US institution to cover US redemptions. Treasury has not yet proposed how comparability will be judged. So in January 2027 there may be a legal door for offshore issuers with no process to walk through it. Platforms can lean on an issuer's representation that it can comply with lawful freeze orders, if they do reasonable diligence.

This matters most for USDT, at about $184 billion the largest stablecoin. Tether is not organised under US law, so the state route is closed to it. Its path to US platforms after July 2028 runs either through comparability for its home jurisdiction or through a US-law vehicle. Our USDT vs USDC comparison covers the reserve differences that make that harder or easier.

Penalties and AML: the teeth

The Act carries criminal penalties of up to $1 million per violation and five years' imprisonment for knowing participation in unlawful issuance, civil penalties of up to $100,000 per day, and fines of up to $500,000 for marketing something as a payment stablecoin that was not issued under the Act. Issuers must be able to block, freeze and reject transfers when lawfully ordered, and certify their AML and sanctions programmes within 180 days of approval and annually after that, per the CRS. A joint customer identification rule from FinCEN, the OCC, Fed, FDIC and NCUA appeared on 22 June 2026. One open question the statute leaves hanging: whether issuer AML duties stop at the first sale or follow coins through secondary on-chain transfers. The answer will shape how AML and sanctions compliance works for every wallet that touches a US-regulated coin.

What to watch next

• 19 October 2026: comments close on Treasury's issuance, offer and sale proposal. Watch whether Treasury moves toward a Regulation S-style conduct test, which it floated.
• November 2026: the OCC's target for its final rule. It is a target, not a promise, but it would be the first complete federal rulebook.
• 30 November 2026: comments close on the Fed proposals and the certification interim final rule.
• 18 January 2027: the Act takes effect. The OCC expects to process issuer applications from 2027, and existing applicants may get up to 12 months of regulatory forbearance.
• 18 January 2028: deadline for initial state certifications.
• 18 July 2028: US platforms may generally offer only coins from permitted or qualifying foreign issuers.

Our read: the federal track is now the default for anything large, and the real competitive variable is how strictly the yield ban is enforced against platform rewards. The market structure bill still in Congress will decide the rest; see our piece on the US crypto market structure law. Nothing here is legal advice, and firms affected by these proposals should work with qualified US counsel.

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