One Year After the GENIUS Act, Federal Stablecoin Rules Remain Unfinished

In brief

One year after the GENIUS Act became law, the federal rulebook it ordered for payment stablecoins remained unfinished at our cutoff. The statute directed regulators to issue implementing regulations within one year of enactment, a mark that fell on July 18, 2026. At the cutoff the Federal Register's GENIUS Act record showed proposed rules and notices from several federal agencies, but no final rule carrying the licensing and supervisory framework into effect. What follows separates what is final from what is only proposed, requested, or still unknown, and stops short of any legal conclusion about the delay.

What the record shows

The GENIUS Act was enacted on July 18, 2025 as Public Law 119-27. Its Section 13(a) directs the primary federal payment-stablecoin regulators to promulgate implementing regulations no later than one year after enactment. That one-year point arrived on July 18, 2026. Reviewed at the cutoff, the Federal Register's index of documents referencing the GENIUS Act contained the payment-stablecoin proposals the agencies label 'Proposed Rule' and related 'Notice' entries, but no final rule carrying out that framework; the only 'Rule' entries the search returns are unrelated documents that merely reference the Act. On that record, the operating framework the law envisions had not been completed a year after enactment.

One timing note matters for accuracy. A separate Federal Register item was first published on July 20, 2026, after our July 19 cutoff, so it is not used as evidence here; in any event it is not a final implementing rule either. Everything below is drawn only from records dated at or before the cutoff.

Proposed, not final

Several agencies have moved, but only to the proposal stage. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency published a proposed rule on March 2, 2026; the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation followed on April 10, 2026; the National Credit Union Administration on May 18, 2026; and a Federal Reserve anti-money-laundering proposal appeared on July 9, 2026. Each is a proposal open to comment, not a binding final rule, and a proposal can change substantially — or not be finalized at all — before it takes legal effect.

The passing of the one-year point does not repeal the Act, invalidate the proposals already issued, or mean that stablecoins escape every existing law. It means the specific licensing and supervisory framework the statute called for was not yet in force at the cutoff. This report keeps that distinction procedural: proposed rules are not final rules, and a passed statutory date on the public record is not, by itself, a legal ruling against any agency.

What to watch

The next signals are procedural: whether any agency advances a proposal to a final rule, the comment deadlines and effective dates attached to the pending proposals, and whether the agencies state whether they consider issuing a proposed rule to satisfy the statute's instruction to promulgate within a year. Those are the documents to check as this moves forward.

What we do not know

Several things are not established from the record. Whether the regulators view issuing a proposed rule as satisfying the statute's instruction to promulgate within a year is not stated in these documents. Expected finalization dates are not disclosed. Whether any state payment-stablecoin regulator has issued a final rule not indexed under the exact term 'GENIUS Act' was not determined here; that would affect wording about every regulator but does not cure the missing federal framework. And no agency statement conceding or disputing a lapse was located at the cutoff.