FDIC moves ahead with GENIUS Act rules for U.S. stablecoins

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Olga Shendetskaya

08.04.2026

FDIC moves ahead with GENIUS Act rules for U.S. stablecoins — The FDIC is preparing bank-style rules for stablecoins

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has taken another step toward bringing stablecoins into mainstream banking supervision. The agency’s board advanced a new notice of proposed rulemaking under the GENIUS Act, and the meeting agenda explicitly included a separate item on requirements and standards for payment stablecoin issuers supervised by the FDIC.

Highlights

The FDIC has advanced a second rule under the GENIUS Act, this time focused on standards for payment stablecoin issuers and custodians.
The proposal requires full 1:1 reserves, redemption within no more than two business days, and restrictions on yield and reserve usage.
Stablecoin holders would not receive FDIC pass-through insurance, but tokenized deposits that meet the legal criteria would be treated like ordinary deposits.

For the market, this matters not only because regulation is moving forward. The proposal shows what federal authorities want dollar-backed stablecoins to look like inside the banking system: fully reserved, subject to strict redemption timelines, capital requirements of their own, and barred from suggesting to token holders that their coins carry FDIC insurance.

FDIC applies a banking logic to stablecoins

According to the FDIC memo, the new proposal would impose requirements on permitted payment stablecoin issuers under its supervision covering reserves, redemption, capital, risk management, and custodial operations. This is already the FDIC’s second rulemaking initiative under the GENIUS Act: the first, approved in December 2025, laid out the application process for banks seeking to issue payment stablecoins through subsidiaries.

The core idea is straightforward: under the FDIC framework, these tokens cannot be issued directly by a bank, but only through a dedicated subsidiary approved by the regulator as a permitted payment stablecoin issuer. The GENIUS Act, signed into law on July 18, 2025, required the relevant regulators to create a federal framework for licensing, supervising, and examining such issuers.

What changes for issuers and banks

The proposal requires reserves to fully back issued stablecoins on a 1:1 basis. The FDIC also proposes limiting reserve concentration at any single financial institution to 40%, requiring issuers to publish monthly reports on reserve composition, and mandating attestation by a registered auditor. In addition, both the CEO and CFO would have to certify the accuracy of those disclosures to the regulator.

The redemption rules are also strict: an issuer would be required to redeem stablecoins no later than two business days after a customer request. At the same time, the proposal explicitly prohibits paying interest or yield simply for holding the token, and limits the reuse of reserves as well as lending for the purpose of purchasing stablecoins.

A separate section deals with insurance and custody services. The FDIC proposes to make clear that deposits held at banks as reserves backing stablecoins would not qualify for pass-through deposit insurance for token holders. By contrast, tokenized deposits that meet the legal definition of a deposit would be treated the same way as traditional bank deposits. For banks that hold those reserves or provide safekeeping services, the proposal would require segregation of customer assets and prohibit commingling them with the custodian’s own funds.

A new lane for dollar stablecoins

The most striking feature of the proposal is that the FDIC is not leaving stablecoins in a gray zone between fintech and banking. Instead, it is bringing them under a familiar bank-style supervisory model. During the de novo period, which typically lasts three years, the regulator proposes imposing an institution-specific minimum capital requirement, with a baseline floor of $5 million, before shifting to a permanent capital assessment based on the issuer’s business model and risk profile.

This is still not a final rule. Once published in the Federal Register, the proposal will be open for public comment for 60 days, and the FDIC is separately seeking feedback on 144 questions. But the direction is now clear. If the rule moves forward without major changes, US stablecoins supervised by the FDIC will begin to look less like standalone crypto products and more like bank payment instruments in digital form.

In addition, we wrote that stablecoins shift from speculation to practical cross-border payments tool.

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