GENIUS Act Rules Miss Their Deadline, Regulators Now Target November 2026

The GENIUS Act was supposed to have finished rulebooks by now. It doesn’t, and the agencies writing them are being unusually candid about the timeline slipping. Here’s the state of play in numbers.

• July 18, 2025 — President Trump signs the GENIUS Act, the first comprehensive federal framework for payment stablecoins, into law.
• July 18, 2026 — The law’s one-year statutory deadline for finalized implementing regulations arrives. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC and the National Credit Union Administration all miss it, none having published a final rule.
• August 4 and August 21, 2026 — Public comment windows close on an FDIC anti-money-laundering proposal and a joint customer-identification (KYC) rule respectively, both still at the proposal stage rather than finalized.
• August 17, 2026 — The Treasury Department issues its own new proposed rule (not final) addressing when stablecoin issuance and sale actually falls under US jurisdiction.
• August 19, 2026 — Speaking at the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium, Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould commits to a new target: “We are very intent on moving quickly and getting a final rule out by November so that we will be able to start processing applications within the new year.”
• November 2026 — The OCC’s stated (but non-binding) target for publishing its final stablecoin rule, covering capital, liquidity and supervision standards for permitted issuers.
• January 18, 2027 — The GENIUS Act’s hard effective date under the statute: 18 months after enactment, regardless of whether final rules exist by then.
• 120 days — The alternative trigger written into the law: if agencies publish final rules before January 18, the framework instead takes effect 120 days after that publication. A November final rule would point to an effective date around March 2027, later than the statutory deadline itself.

The practical upshot is a compressed and slightly contradictory runway: prospective stablecoin issuers are expected to be ready to operate under a framework that, as of this writing, still exists only in proposed form, with several component rules (KYC verification, AML controls, jurisdictional scope, and the core capital and custody standards) moving on separate and only loosely coordinated tracks across four different regulators. None of the missed deadlines carry an automatic penalty — the law doesn’t specify what happens if agencies simply run late — but they do mean issuers, exchanges and banks angling to enter the stablecoin business are currently building compliance programs against a moving target.

Whether November holds is itself an open question; regulators have already blown through one statutory deadline this year, and a 376-page rulebook covering an entirely new category of regulated entity is not typically finished on the first attempt at a self-imposed date.

Want the fundamentals on how stablecoins actually work before the rulebook catches up? Coin680’s Bitcoin Academy covers the basics.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Regulatory timelines are subject to change without notice — always do your own research before making investment decisions.