GENIUS Act Takes Effect by January 18 With Every Stablecoin Rule Still a Proposal
The GENIUS Act goes live on January 18, 2027, at the latest. The law sets its own effective date as the earlier of that day or 120 days after regulators finish the implementing rules. With three months to go, not one of those rules is final. Issuers, banks and exchanges are getting a hard start date and a rulebook that is still in draft.
The statute gave regulators a year from its July 2025 signing to write the regulations. That deadline lapsed in July. What exists now is a stack of proposals from five agencies, with comment periods that close weeks before the law starts to bite.
What’s on the table
The Federal Reserve was the last big piece. It issued two proposals on September 24, covering stablecoin subsidiaries of state member banks, the custodians that hold their reserves, and large state-chartered issuers. Comments are open until November 30. Seven weeks later the Act takes effect.
The Fed’s draft is detailed. Reserves have to match outstanding coins one for one, held in cash, Fed balances, eligible deposits, short-dated Treasuries and repos on them, or funds that hold only those things. Redemption should generally happen within two business days. Capital is set by an operational-risk charge that steps down with size: 2% on the first $20 billion outstanding, 1.5% on the next $30 billion, 1% above $50 billion, plus a slice of non-reserve revenue. Issuers report weekly on issuance, redemptions and reserves.
The yield ban gets teeth too. Paying interest just for holding a stablecoin is out, and the Fed proposes a rebuttable presumption against affiliate or white-label arrangements that would deliver the same thing by another route. That closes the obvious workaround, and it’s why tokenized money market funds have been raising money as the yield product stablecoins can’t be.
Everyone else is also at the proposal stage. The OCC published drafts in March and June for national bank issuers. The FDIC and NCUA have proposals out for the institutions they supervise. Treasury proposed its test for when a state regime counts as “substantially similar” in April, then in August its rules on issuance, offering and sale, with comments due October 19.
The gaps that matter on January 18
Two of the Act’s gates have no working process behind them yet.
The first is the state route. Issuers with $10 billion or less outstanding can choose state supervision instead of federal, but only under a state regime Treasury has certified. As of early September, Treasury had certified none. A small issuer can’t plan around a state charter that may or may not count.
The second is the foreign route. An offshore issuer can serve the US only once Treasury decides its home country runs a comparable regime. Treasury hasn’t even proposed how it will make that decision. Meanwhile its August draft says that from January 18, a US exchange or other digital asset service provider may sell a foreign issuer’s coin only if that issuer can technically comply with lawful orders, such as freezes. The broader rule, that US platforms sell only coins from permitted issuers or approved foreign ones, starts July 18, 2028.
So the first date is near and narrow, and the second is far off and wide. Platforms need to know by January which offshore coins can freeze on a court order. Issuers need to know before 2028 whether their home regime will pass a test that doesn’t exist yet.
Who wears the uncertainty
Large US issuers are in the best position. They know their regulator, the Fed and OCC drafts are concrete, and their reserves already look like what the rules describe. Final text will move numbers around the edges. It won’t change the model.
The squeeze is on everyone in between: mid-sized issuers waiting on a state certification, exchanges that list offshore coins, and banks deciding whether to launch tokenized deposits or a stablecoin subsidiary. Each of them has to build compliance for January against drafts that can still change, with no final word from regulators until shortly before the start date, if then.
The likeliest outcome is a law that takes effect on schedule and gets enforced loosely at first, while final rules land through the first half of 2027. That’s workable for anyone already running a reserve-backed, freeze-capable coin. For anyone who isn’t, January 18 is a deadline to be ready for rules nobody has finished writing.
For the Fed proposal’s first day and how a hacker priced the freeze function, see the Bitget hack and the Fed’s reserve rules.