The GENIUS Act Finally Has a Draft Rulebook — and a Visible Deadline

On 17 August the US Treasury issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking covering section 3 of the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act — the GENIUS Act. It is the first major proposal to implement a law that has been on the books since July 2025, and it puts hard definitions around language that had deliberately been left open.

Beginning on the effective date, a person generally may not issue a payment stablecoin in the United States without an appropriate federal or state licence. Separately, digital asset service providers generally may not offer, sell, or otherwise make available foreign-issued payment stablecoins unless the foreign issuer has the technological capability to comply with — and will comply with — the terms of any lawful order, plus any reciprocal arrangement between the US and the issuer's home jurisdiction.

Definitions are the whole story

The proposal spends most of its energy on two phrases. The first is what it means to “issue a payment stablecoin in the United States,” which determines when an issuer needs a GENIUS licence at all. The second is what it means to “offer or sell” a payment stablecoin to a person “in the United States,” which determines when and how tokens can reach US users.

Anyone who has followed crypto regulation knows why this is the fight. A token is global by construction; a licence is jurisdictional. Drawing the line between them decides which businesses have to restructure and which can carry on unchanged.

A notable signal on investment rules

One sentence in the proposal is worth reading twice. Treasury writes that the Act “evinces a clear intent for payment stablecoins to serve as an effective means of payment and settlement, including across borders,” and that “application of traditional investment rules to payment stablecoins may frustrate that goal.”

That distinction shapes everything downstream: disclosure obligations, who can distribute a token, and whether the thing in your wallet is treated as money you spend or an asset you hold.

The timeline is tight and everyone knows it

The law set a one-year target for implementing its rules. That deadline passed last month without being met. The next marker is the January effective date, and it is unlikely every rule will be finalised by then. The public and the growing industry of stablecoin issuers now have 60 days to comment, after which Treasury is expected to spend further months reviewing submissions before issuing a final rule.

New regulations usually arrive with transition runways, so the practical compliance date for many firms will land later than the statutory one. This proposal also builds on an advance notice Treasury issued last September, which had sought comment across a wide range of implementation questions — including the treatment of foreign issuers, the point the industry will scrutinise hardest.