Stablecoin rules miss their deadline as agencies file 10 proposals
A year after the GENIUS Act became law, US agencies have issued 10 proposed stablecoin rules but zero final ones.
US regulators let the GENIUS Act's one-year rulemaking deadline pass on Saturday without a single final rule on the books. Four agencies spent the year collecting comments and drafting proposals, but stablecoin issuers now operate under a federal framework that exists in law and not yet in enforceable regulation.
What the trackers show
Rulemaking trackers from law firm Chapman and crypto investment firm Paradigm count 10 notices of proposed rulemaking issued since the law was signed on July 18, 2025, and zero finalized. Treasury put out four proposals, touching state-regime equivalency standards, foreign issuer registration and anti-money-laundering compliance. The OCC issued two, covering approval standards for nationally chartered payment stablecoin issuers. The FDIC issued one, focused on reserve management and supervisory expectations for insured institutions that issue stablecoins. The NCUA proposed a rule letting federally insured credit unions issue stablecoins, and the OCC, Fed and FDIC jointly filed one interagency proposal meant to align supervision across all three. Ten proposals, four agencies, one missed date, no finished text.
Why a missed date still counts
Missing the deadline doesn't undo the GENIUS Act. The law stands, and issuers already registered under it keep operating. But a law with no final rules is a law whose exact compliance bar hasn't been set. Reserve composition standards, AML thresholds, what counts as an equivalent state regime — all of that sits in proposal form, open to further comment, revision or agency infighting before anyone can call it settled. Issuers who built compliance programs against draft language now wait to find out if that language survives to the final rule unchanged. That's a cost even if it's not a legal one.
The pattern also shows where Washington's attention has actually gone. Anchorage Digital used the anniversary to push Congress toward the CLARITY Act instead of pressing agencies to finish the GENIUS rules, arguing the same market-structure clarity that stablecoins got should extend to the rest of digital assets. That's a tell: the industry's energy is shifting toward the next unfinished law rather than closing out this one. Meanwhile banking groups including the ABA and ICBA sent a joint letter on July 13 warning that CLARITY's stablecoin yield provisions could let crypto firms offer bank-like returns without bank-like requirements, and Galaxy Digital cut its odds of CLARITY passing in 2026 to 50% citing no unified Senate text and a narrowing floor schedule. Two laws, two sets of unfinished business, and regulators moving slower than the legislative pipeline behind them.
What would confirm the read
Watch the Treasury and OCC proposals for actual final-rule publication dates. If agencies finalize the core reserve and registration rules within the next two or three months, this reads as ordinary bureaucratic lag on a genuinely new framework. If the gap stretches toward a second year with agencies still taking comments, that's a signal the framework is stalling under its own complexity, and issuers will keep building on rules that could still move under them.