US regulators blow past GENIUS Act deadline for stablecoin rules
A year after signing, the GENIUS Act still has no final rules. Treasury, OCC, FDIC and the Fed all missed the deadline.
Saturday marked one year since President Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law, the first federal framework built specifically for stablecoins. It was also the day the law's own rulemaking deadline passed with no final rules from any of the four agencies responsible for writing them.
What the trackers show
Treasury, the OCC, the FDIC and the Federal Reserve Board all published proposed rules over the past year and took public comment on them, according to rulemaking trackers kept by law firm Chapman and crypto investment firm Paradigm. None converted a proposal into a final rule before the deadline. Missing the date doesn't undo the statute. The law stands. What's missing is the operating detail issuers need: reserve composition standards, redemption mechanics, exam procedures. Four agencies, zero finished rulebooks, twelve months after the bill became law.
Separately in Europe, the picture is closer to done. ESMA's interim MiCA register hit 294 licensed crypto-asset service providers after a second post-deadline update added 14 firms, including Ripple's European payments arm, Portugal's Bison Bank and Croatia's state-owned HPB. That's down from the 37 added in the first post-deadline batch on July 3, a sign the initial licensing rush is thinning out as the backlog clears.
The read
The GENIUS Act was sold as the moment US stablecoin issuers got legal clarity. A year later, they have a law but not the rules that make the law operable. Proposed rules aren't enforceable; issuers can't build compliance programs against a draft. That leaves the biggest dollar-stablecoin issuers operating under the same patchwork of state licenses and prior guidance they had before signing day, just with a statute now sitting in the background unenforced in practice.
Contrast that with MiCA. Europe's framework had its own rocky rollout, but the CASP register is now a working list that's grown past transitional deadlines into steady-state licensing, adding names in batches of dozens rather than starting from zero. The US has the opposite sequencing problem: a headline law with the technical scaffolding still pending. For an issuer deciding where to house new stablecoin products this year, that gap between statute and rule is the whole ballgame.
The France-Polymarket action underlines the same theme from a different angle: regulators moving on their own timeline regardless of industry pressure. France's gambling authority ordered ISPs to block Polymarket outright, arguing its event contracts are unlicensed gambling, with fines up to 100,000 euros for anyone advertising the platform there. Polymarket now says it's geoblocked in 36 regions, joining Singapore, Poland, Portugal, Hungary, Ukraine, Brazil and Indonesia. Rulemaking delays and outright blocks are two versions of the same signal: crypto regulation moves at the regulator's pace, not the product's.
What to watch
Watch whether Treasury, the OCC, the FDIC or the Fed issue any final GENIUS Act rule before year-end. A first finalized rule, even a narrow one on reserve reporting, would show the process is unstuck. Continued silence into 2027 would confirm that the US has a stablecoin law with no working regulatory floor under it, while MiCA's CASP count keeps climbing in the background.