U.S. stablecoin rulemaking is becoming an operating stack
The United States now has a much fuller implementation stack around the GENIUS Act. Treasury's state-route proposal, the joint FinCEN-OFAC AML and sanctions proposal, and the FDIC's bank-facing reserve, redemption, custody, insurance, and tokenized-deposit proposal together make the future payment-stablecoin perimeter far more usable. The regime is still proposed rather than final, but the operating map is starting to look real.
Key takeaways
- • The U.S. stablecoin market still does not have final rules or approved issuers under a completed federal regime.
- • What it now has is something nearly as important for market formation: a cross-agency draft operating stack that makes the direction of travel far easier to underwrite.
Trigger
Genius Act Broad Based
On April 10, 2026, the Federal Register published Treasury/FinCEN/OFAC and FDIC GENIUS Act notices of proposed rulemaking, following Treasury's April 3, 2026 proposal on state-regime similarity. Together, those April actions define the illicit-finance layer, the bank-prudential and custody layer, and the state-versus-federal routing principles for U.S. payment-stablecoin issuance.
SourceSN Desk view
What changed in April is that the GENIUS Act stopped looking like a statute with blank spaces and started looking more like an operating stack. Treasury's April 3 proposed rule sets the principles for when a state regime can count as substantially similar to the federal framework and makes clear that, for most nonbank state issuers, the comparison baseline is the OCC framework, with transition to OCC oversight above $10 billion absent a waiver. Treasury, FinCEN, and OFAC then published an April 10 proposed rule requiring permitted payment stablecoin issuers to maintain written and approved AML/CFT programs, file suspicious activity reports, collect beneficial-ownership information for legal-entity customers, build block, freeze, reject, and lawful-order capabilities, and run a risk-based sanctions program built around management commitment, risk assessment, internal controls, testing, and training.
The same day, the FDIC published its own proposed rule for FDIC-supervised issuers and insured depository institutions, covering 1:1 identifiable reserves, redemption, capital, an operational backstop, monthly reserve disclosures, custody controls, and the treatment of reserve deposits and tokenized deposits. The durable conclusion is implementation buildout, not market finality. All three April moves are still notices of proposed rulemaking, with the Treasury state-regime proposal open until June 2, 2026 and the FinCEN/OFAC and FDIC proposals open until June 9, 2026. Treasury has proposed principles for state similarity, but the official record reviewed here does not show any Treasury approval of a substantially similar state regime. FinCEN expressly says a separate customer-identification-program rulemaking is still expected. The FDIC proposal also draws a hard boundary between payment stablecoins and tokenized deposits and says reserve deposits would be insured as corporate deposits of the issuer, not on a pass-through basis to stablecoin holders. Earlier OCC and NCUA proposals mean the federal stack is becoming more complete. The market is starting to look far more buildable, even though the evidence still stops short of final agency rules, named issuer approvals under a completed regime, or live harmonized operating behavior.