Fed Proposes 60-Day Comment Window on Stablecoin Reserve Rules Under GENIUS Act

The two draft rules now sit at the proposal stage, with a 60-day public comment window running from their publication in the Federal Register. The United States Federal Reserve put the measures forward on September 26, 2026, as the implementing framework for the GENIUS Act — the stablecoin statute Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed the previous year. The package reaches two groups: payment stablecoin issuers under the central bank's supervision, and supervised banks seeking authorization to issue such tokens directly. Payment stablecoins, under the statute, are tokens issued for use as a means of payment and marketed as redeemable at a fixed value.

The first proposal sets the asset side of the ledger. Issuers supervised by the Fed would be required to back the full value of their tokens with highly liquid assets — short-term US Treasuries are the cited example — instead of a discretionary collateral mix. The draft also prescribes standardized capital requirements sized to absorb credit and operational risk, establishes risk-management standards across the stablecoin business line, sets out how custodians holding reserve assets will be regulated, and defines the range of activities that Fed-supervised banks may perform in the sector. The second proposal governs entry into issuance. A supervised bank that wants to issue payment stablecoins directly must submit a concrete business plan and financial information, and the draft formalizes objection and hearing procedures for applicants contesting an authorization decision. Fed Vice Chair Michael Barr supplied the underlying logic: a stablecoin keeps its value only when users can redeem it at par, promptly. In the remarks accompanying the release, Barr described the rulemaking as an important step in the right direction within the framework the GENIUS Act provides, endorsed the limits on reserve assets and the transparent, standardized capital requirements, and identified the open question he wants commenters to address — whether the rules sufficiently cover interest-rate and foreign-exchange volatility risk.

From Statute to Rulebook

The statutory foundation predates the proposal by more than a year. The GENIUS Act moved through Congress and was signed into law by President Donald Trump on July 18, 2025. Implementation has proceeded in sequence since then: the Treasury Department supplied the principal legal definitions, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation began work on related supervisory procedures, and the Fed's two draft rules now add the central-bank layer. Taken together, the sequence shows the institutional integration of the US stablecoin market shifting from statute to operating rulebook. The Fed's stated rationale is a single federal framework — one set of reserve, capital and licensing standards in place of a patchwork — with an explicit supervisory aim of strengthening anti-money-laundering surveillance, including countering the financing of terrorism. Per the central bank's own framing, the measures are intended to protect financial stability while the market is brought inside the regulated perimeter. The practical effects divide by audience. For issuers, full backing in short-dated Treasuries plus standardized capital leaves little room for the partial-reserve or high-yield structures that circulated in earlier stablecoin tokenomics. For bank applicants, the second rule converts what was previously a discretionary judgment into a documented filing: business plan, financial statements, and formal hearing rights. Holders are affected more indirectly — a fully reserved, bank-supervised token is engineered to behave like a redeemable claim rather than a speculative asset, whether it sits with one of the best crypto exchanges or in self-custody behind a Ledger recovery key. The design also draws a line against decentralized issuance models: a protocol such as Lido DAO issues staked-ether receipts whose tokenomics rest on staking yield rather than Treasury collateral, and liquid-staking issuers like Jito (JTO) on Solana sit entirely outside the licensed perimeter these rules define. As proposed, neither rule names a private issuer; both would take binding effect only after the comment period and finalization. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Binance.

Board Holds the Next Decision

COINOTAG's reading of the Federal Register notices: these are proposals, not final rules, and nothing binds an issuer until the Board acts. Once finalized, the documents would bind payment stablecoin issuers under Fed supervision and any supervised bank seeking issuance approval; the 60-day clock, running from Federal Register publication, is the only deadline currently fixed. The next decision rests with the Fed's Board, weighed against the comment file — and the proposal text itself flags the input it is waiting on: feedback on whether the reserve and capital standards adequately address interest-rate and foreign-exchange volatility risk. What the Board does with that file is not yet on the record.