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The GENIUS Act became law on July 18, 2025, and the headlines celebrated it as a historic moment for US crypto regulation. Ten months later, the celebratory phase is over. What has replaced it is a dense, parallel rulemaking process involving five federal agencies, each publishing its own proposed rules, each asking its own questions, and each closing comment windows on different deadlines.
The first of those deadlines lands today, June 2, and what gets filed before it closes will shape how digital dollars are actually regulated in the United States.
The Treasury Department’s April 2026 notice of proposed rulemaking is the instrument with today’s deadline. Its subject is the federal-state divide at the heart of the GENIUS Act’s design. The act allows stablecoin issuers with up to $10 billion in outstanding issuance to elect state-level supervision rather than federal oversight, but only if their state’s regulatory regime is deemed substantially similar to the federal framework. The Treasury’s proposed rule establishes the criteria regulators will use to make that determination.
The stakes for smaller issuers are significant. A state that cannot demonstrate that its regime meets the Treasury’s standard loses the ability to host domestically supervised stablecoin issuers. Issuers that exceed the $10-billion threshold are pulled directly into federal oversight regardless of their state. The criteria the Treasury proposed combine uniform minimum requirements, including reserve mandates, redemption standards, and liquidity rules, with a degree of flexibility for states to tailor implementation. Comments received by tomorrow will determine how rigid or accommodating those criteria become in the final rule.
Tomorrow’s deadline is the first, not the last. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) published a 376-page implementation rule in February with a comment window that closed May 1. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN)-Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) joint rulemaking periods both close June 9. The Federal Reserve, which under the GENIUS Act serves as the primary regulator for Permitted Payment Stablecoin Issuers subsidiaries of state member banks, has not yet issued its proposed rule at all, a gap that industry groups have flagged as a sequencing problem since the Fed’s framework will need to interlock with every other agency’s rule.
The FinCEN-OFAC joint rule is the most operationally demanding piece of the framework. It formally classifies permitted payment stablecoin issuers as financial institutions under the Bank Secrecy Act, requiring full Anti-Money Laundering (AML) programs, a designated compliance officer, customer identification procedures, suspicious activity reporting, sanctions screening, and onchain freeze and seizure capability aligned with OFAC designations.
The last requirement is particularly significant. It does not create new freeze powers but formalizes them as a technical regulatory requirement rather than a voluntary policy commitment, a distinction the Zama incident last week made concrete in a way no rulemaking document could.
The comment record emerging from these proceedings highlights two recurring objections. The first is proportionality: Smaller and mid-sized issuers argue that the compliance burden being constructed, spanning reserve management, AML systems, sanctions screening, and audit requirements, has been effectively designed around firms like Tether and Circle and will act as a structural barrier to entry for players below a certain scale.
The second is sequencing. With the Federal Reserve’s rules still pending and full implementation not expected until July 2026, issuers are being asked to build compliance infrastructure around a framework that remains incomplete.
The OCC’s proposed rule poses more than 200 specific questions for public comment on definitions, reserve compositions, liquidity requirements, and custody arrangements. That volume of open questions in a rule published just four months before its intended implementation date signals that the final framework will look materially different from what was proposed and that the comment period is not a formality.
Full implementation is targeted for July 2026, with grace periods potentially extending into 2027 for issuers requiring additional transition time. For major issuers like Circle and Paxos, the compliance infrastructure is largely in place. For the broader category of bank subsidiaries, fintech issuers, and internationally active stablecoin operators, the window between final rules and required compliance is narrow enough to create genuine operational risk.
Today’s deadline marks the first point at which the public record begins to close. Submissions made before June 2 will carry weight in shaping the Treasury’s final rule. Anything not submitted by that deadline will fall outside the formal consideration process.
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