The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency published its final rule for payment stablecoin issuers on Tuesday, October 21, 2026. The rule implements the GENIUS Act and takes effect January 18, 2027, the same day the statute becomes binding. That leaves issuers 89 days from publication to bring their operations into line. The scale is large: the two leading dollar stablecoins, Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC, hold more than $250 billion in combined market capitalization.
Getting here took time. Congress enacted the GENIUS Act on July 18, 2025. The OCC proposed its rule on March 2, 2026, closed the formal comment window on May 1, and kept taking late comments through July 1. Roughly 328 commenters weighed in, and the agency finalized the rule 233 days after proposing it.
The rule settles the basics in three places. Licensing sorts issuers into bank subsidiaries, federally qualified nonbank issuers, or state-qualified issuers operating below a $10 billion ceiling. Reserve standards keep the core liquidity, diversification, and concentration requirements while giving issuers more room to manage reserve assets. Capital and operational backstops scale with the nature, scope, and risk of each issuer’s business instead of applying one template to everyone. The rule also reaches foreign payment stablecoin issuers under the OCC’s jurisdiction and certain custody activities by OCC-supervised entities.
Redemption is where the agency faced the hardest tension. The rule defines a business day to exclude weekends and federal holidays, and it accommodates special purpose vehicles that shield stablecoin holders. Several commenters warned that any power to freeze or stretch out redemptions during a withdrawal spike could itself start a run, because investors might read the safeguard as a sign that redemptions will not be honored. The final text reflects that debate without settling it in public.
The loudest fight never left the statute. The GENIUS Act bars an issuer from paying interest or yield to a holder merely for holding, using, or retaining the token. The OCC kept that ban and declined to hand down a blanket answer on existing rewards programs. Each arrangement will be judged on its facts, and the agency can update the rules as business models change. Firms such as Coinbase, PayPal, and Kraken market rewards rates on stablecoin balances, and each must now work out whether those features survive. The result is a gray zone the final rule did not close.
The final rule still leaves real runway. The Bank Secrecy Act, anti-money-laundering, and sanctions chapters are being written in a separate rulemaking, and the agency will announce separately when it starts accepting applications and waiver requests. The rule also narrows the definition of customer to direct counterparties, so a holder who bought a token through a distributor is not the issuer’s customer until they redeem directly.
Compliance starts January 18, 2027, and the argument continues after that. Watch three things: the separate BSA/AML final rule, the OCC’s application-processing announcement, and how Tether, Circle, and the exchanges explain whether their existing yield and rewards features survive contact with the new text.
Source: BlockchainReporter.