This year, Tether rolled out USAT — launched with U.S. standards in mind and issued through U.S. banking partner Anchorage Digital. So far, it remains at a relatively low level of usage.
“Non-compliant stablecoins cannot be used by U.S. institutions when the safe harbor expires in 2028, but we don’t expect the market to wait,” said Kevin Wysocki, head of policy at Anchorage Digital, the crypto-native bank that manages a number of stablecoins. He said the company believes institutional users will move toward “compliant, bank-issued digital dollars well ahead of that deadline.”
Do they have two years?
GENIUS included a three-year grace period for compliance, and two years remain, after which U.S. crypto platforms won’t be able to offer stablecoins whose issuers haven’t checked all the regulatory boxes. However, there seems to be some disagreement over whether foreign issuers are meant to enjoy that same safe harbor. Some lawyers in finance assume that Tether gets until July 18, 2028, to comply, but others have suggested that foreign issuers would have to comply the moment GENIUS officially goes live, which is likely six months from now in January.
“Upon the effectiveness of the GENIUS Act, foreign issuers will need to immediately comply with lawful orders to seize and freeze coins held by illicit actors, but they will have a runway of approximately two more years to prepare for the additional requirements so that their coins may remain eligible for listing on U.S. centralized trading platforms,” said Justin Levine, a lawyer at Davis Polk who advises clients on stablecoin issues, adding that one of those remaining requirements — registration with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — is likely to require a “significant undertaking”
US regulatory agencies missed Saturday’s rulemaking deadline under the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, one year after the law was signed.
While several regulatory agencies published proposed rules and collected public feedback during the past year, no final regulations were issued before the deadline.
Those agencies include the Department of the Treasury, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Federal Reserve Board, according to rulemaking trackers by law firm Chapman and crypto investment company Paradigm.
Missing the statutory deadline does not invalidate the GENIUS Act, but the unfinished rules could result in regulatory uncertainty for stablecoin issuers.
The GENIUS Act established the first comprehensive federal regulatory framework for stablecoins in the US. The act was signed into law by President Donald Trump on July 18, 2025.
Related: ABA, state banking groups push back on CLARITY Act stablecoin yield provisions
Treasury issued four rule proposals since law signing
Of the 10 notices of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) issued since since the GENIUS Act was signed into law, the Treasury Department issued the most proposals, four, covering the broader implementation of the act, including standards for determining whether state stablecoin regulatory regimes are similar to the federal framework, registration requirements for foreign stablecoin issuers and guidelines for compliance with anti-money laundering measures, according to Paradigm.
Rulemaking progress after the GENIUS Act was signed into law. Source: Paradigm.
The OCC issued two NPRMs covering nationally chartered payment stablecoin issuers, approval requirements and supervisory standards.
The FDIC issued one NPRM on FDIC-supervised institutions that issue payment stablecoins, focused on supervisory expectations and operational standards such as reserve management.
The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) proposed rules enabling federally insured credit unions to participate in stablecoin issuance.
Finally, federal banking agencies jointly proposed an interagency implementation rule to harmonize supervision across the OCC, Federal Reserve and FDIC, aiming to ensure consistent supervisory expectations across all federal regulators.
Anchorage urges lawmakers to pass CLARITY Act
Federally chartered crypto bank Anchorage Digital took the occasion of the one-year anniversary to urge lawmakers to pass a second piece of crypto legislation, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (CLARITY).
“On GENIUS’ one-year anniversary, we’re renewing our call for Congress to pass the CLARITY Act and extend the clear market-structure rules that worked for stablecoins to the broader digital asset economy,” Anchorage Digital wrote in a Friday report.
The CLARITY Act seeks to establish the first federal regulatory framework for digital assets in the US. It cleared the Senate Banking Committee in May, though banking industry groups argued that it would allow crypto firms to offer yields on stablecoins without facing the same requirements as traditional banks.
On July 13, state banking associations, including the American Bankers Association (ABA) and the Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA), sent a joint letter urging Senate leaders to provide more detail on the CLARITY Act’s stablecoin yield provisions and argued that new amendments need to prevent payment stablecoins from acting as deposit substitutes rather than pure transaction tools.
On June 26, Galaxy Digital cut its odds of the CLARITY Act becoming law in 2026 to 50%, citing the lack of a unified Senate Banking-Agriculture text, no firm floor schedule and a narrowing legislative window before lawmakers leave Washington.
Magazine: Gambling on random Pokémon cards: Onchain gagcha hits record high as crypto sinks
Derivatives account for the vast majority of crypto trading volumes, but options remain a relatively small corner of the market, dominated by a handful of established venues including Deribit, CME Group and Binance. New entrants are increasingly betting that broader adoption of options will follow the institutionalization of digital assets.
The move is the latest step in Kraken’s transformation from a crypto exchange into a broader financial platform offering trading, payments and other digital asset services.
Growing the market, not just market share
Rather than focusing solely on taking market share from incumbent venues, Theodorou believes the larger opportunity is expanding the addressable market by making options easier to use.
“The existing options market in crypto has been built for a narrow slice of the trader base,” Theodorou said.
“Our offering broadens access through a straightforward, dollar-settled contract in the same account clients already use for spot and futures,” she added.
A retail-first approach
According to Theodorou, the slow growth of crypto options is less a demand problem than a product design problem.
“The gap in crypto options isn’t demand, it’s design,” Theodorou said.
She notes that existing crypto options platforms have largely catered to institutional traders and market makers, while retail traders instead have gravitated toward perpetual futures, which became the industry’s dominant speculative product because of their relative simplicity.
Michael Saylor, executive chairman and co-founder of Strategy, has come out swinging against a new proposal to clean up Bitcoin’s ‘spam,’ arguing that it could fundamentally alter how the world’s largest blockchain operates.
The Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 110, aimed at temporarily restricting arbitrary data to focus on the core monetary functions, is a threat to the main principles of the network, Saylor explained in a comprehensive critique published on X, titled “110 reasons BIP-110 is a bad idea.”
“The proposed cure is more dangerous than the condition,” Saylor said in the recent detailed analysis. “BIP 110 would use consensus to narrow valid activity, constrain future options, complicate deployment, and establish a precedent it cannot later erase.”
Saylor’s primary objection is based on the “no-questions-asked” nature of money. “Bitcoin cannot read intent,” Saylor writes. “The network cannot know whether bytes represent an image, a proof, a contract, metadata, an authentication record, or a future application,” argued.
By banning “spam,” the protocol would effectively elevate human judgment into protocol law, effectively turning Bitcoin’s conservatism upside down.
‘Too aggressive’
Saylor is the latest bitcoin executive to weigh in on this highly debated topic among the Bitcoin community.
Project Eleven says it has funded a proof that lets a wallet’s own key-derivation path stand in as ownership after quantum computers can forge its signatures. It runs in 243 milliseconds on a laptop.
Mastercard and Visa process more than 50,000 transactions per second, and the team calls that figure ‘“its floor, not its target.” Zcash’s current cryptography would require a node to take in and verify more than 500 megabytes of data every second to keep up, because every private transaction carries a proof, and proofs are large.
That is roughly a full DVD of data arriving every ten seconds, continuously, and no current Zcash software runs anywhere near that. But the missing piece is the reason each bottleneck exists.
Bowe’s Project Tachyon is tackling this by working on recursive proofs, in which one proof attests to the validity of thousands of others, dramatically reducing the amount of data that must be checked at consensus.
Under Tachyon, a node verifies a single proof instead of the thousands, which the team says reduces the requirement for consensus data from 100 megabytes per second to 500 megabytes, a level they claim is technically achievable with careful engineering.
Wallet bottlenecks and Valar’s PIR solution
Wallets have a different problem. Because Zcash hides who a transaction is for, a wallet cannot ask a server which transactions belong to it without giving itself away. It pulls down everything and tests each one, which is why wallet software tops out at about one transaction per second.
France’s gambling regulator, the Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ), ordered internet service providers to block Polymarket on July 16, treating the prediction market as an illegal gambling site rather than a financial trading venue.
The ANJ said earlier restrictions had failed to keep French users off the platform. Polymarket drew 578,751 visits from 205,057 unique visitors in France in June, according to Similarweb data cited by the regulator, despite a ban on financial transactions in place since November 2024. A VPN was enough to bypass it.
The homepage remained accessible, allowing users to view live markets and odds. The ANJ said the real-time odds display promoted an unauthorized gambling service.
“The site’s homepage, which dynamically displays real-time odds for various events open to betting, thus serves as a major channel for disseminating and promoting Polymarket’s offerings, even though the site’s operations are not authorized in France,” the regulator wrote. Fines can reach 100,000 euros ($114,380).
Polymarket didn’t immediately respond to a comment from CoinDesk.
The ANJ also cited a complaint from France’s weather service, Météo-France, over a tampered temperature sensor tied to weather-based bets, prompting the Paris prosecutor’s cybercrime unit to open an investigation on May 4.
Jan said many Binance employees, including himself, already keep most of their assets on the exchange. “I could make payments, I could use my debit card to spend whatever I need wherever I want,” he said.
Lines are blurring
Eneko Knorr, co-founder and CEO of Dubai-based stablecoin company Stabolut, said the line between banks and crypto companies is becoming harder to see.
“Today, you see regular banks offering crypto, and crypto platforms offering real bank accounts and normal banking services,” Knorr told CoinDesk. “Of course, the world still runs on regular money, so we all have to make a standard bank transfer to pay rent or the utility bills.”
Knorr said younger customers may choose an app that combines stablecoins with daily banking services.
Rohan Misra, head of the Gulf Cooperation Council region and CEO of AMINA Bank ADGM, said stablecoins are increasingly used for payments and settlement but still need regulated banking infrastructure.
“The wallet alone isn’t the bank account,” Misra said. “The regulated infrastructure around it is.”
Misra also questioned whether self-custody, where users control their private keys, would become the default.
“Self-custody means if someone accesses your private key, your assets are gone with no recourse, no recovery and no insurance,” he said. “That’s cash under a mattress.”
Dollar-linked stablecoins already account for roughly 90% of crypto transaction volume in Brazil, most of it used for payments and settlement, according to tax authority data.
Brazil processes between $6 billion and $8 billion in crypto each month, much of it using dollar-denominated stablecoins instead of the country’s own currency.
However, even as dollar stablecoins have proliferated, Brazil’s central bank has moved to limit their role in regulated cross-border payments. Resolution 561, effective October 1, is set to bar payment firms from settling cross-border payments in stablecoins or other crypto, closing a back-end channel that had routed reais through dollar tokens. The central bank has cast stablecoins as a threat to monetary sovereignty, tax enforcement and anti-money laundering controls.
Pix now faces pressure from both sides after Washington named it a trade barrier, while Brazilian regulators shield it from growing competition from dollar-backed stablecoins.
Pix, however, may not be competing with stablecoins.
“In practice, they are complementary,” Rodrigo Caggiano, founder of Brazilian real-world asset monitoring platform RWA Monitor, told CoinDesk. “Pix has addressed domestic instant payments well, while stablecoins expand what is possible by operating on blockchain networks.”
U.S. pressure is likely to accelerate Brazil’s regulatory debate on stablecoins and digital financial infrastructure, Caggiano said, as the central bank builds its own tokenized-settlement system, Drex, on similar programmable rails.
