The January 18, 2027 enforcement date for the GENIUS Act is not a suggestion. It is a hard statutory cliff, and as of early September 2026, the ground beneath it remains largely unformed. The Act mandated that primary regulators finalize their implementing rules by July 18, 2026. That date has come and gone without a single final rule to show for it, as confirmed by the Chapman and Cutler rulemaking tracker. Market participants are now navigating a transition where the legal framework for permitted status is defined by pending Notices of Proposed Rulemaking rather than codified law.
Under Section 3(a) of the Act, it becomes unlawful for any person other than a permitted payment stablecoin issuer to issue a payment stablecoin in the United States starting January 18, 2027. Civil penalties reach up to $500,000 per knowing or willful violation. Section 3(b) extends the perimeter further: by July 18, 2028, digital asset service providers may no longer offer or sell non-permitted stablecoins to U.S. persons. The statutory language is rigid. The regulatory machinery tasked with operationalizing it has proven remarkably slow.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency remains the most visible actor. At the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium on August 19, Comptroller Jonathan V. Gould committed to a final rule by November. \”We will have a final rule out by November, so we are working with great speed here,\” he said. The OCC is currently processing an information collection notice for PPSI application forms, with a comment deadline of September 25. That is a commitment, not a statutory guarantee. The OCC’s underlying NPRM (Bulletin 2026-3), published in February, closed its comment period in May. No final rule has followed.
The rest of the regulatory landscape is thinner. The Treasury NPRM, published August 18, addresses the Section 3 gatekeeping rules—who can issue, what foreign issuers must do, and when DSPs must stop offering non-permitted coins. Comments are due October 19. The FDIC’s NPRM, published in April, closed its comment period in June and remains in limbo. The Federal Reserve has not issued an NPRM at all for state-member-bank subsidiaries, leaving a hole in the framework that affects a significant slice of the banking system.
Some entities are already positioned. Five firms—Circle, Ripple, BitGo, Fidelity, and Paxos—received conditional approval for national trust bank charters in December 2025. Circle secured its own charter in July 2026. Additional approvals followed for Bridge, Protego, and Crypto.com. But a trust bank charter is not the same thing as Federal Qualified Payment Stablecoin Issuer status. The charter gets you to the door. The FQPSI designation is what lets you walk through it, and the rules for that designation are still in proposed form.
This gap has not gone unnoticed at the state level. The Conference of State Bank Supervisors and the Money Transmitter Regulators Association, in a joint comment letter, argued that the OCC’s trust bank charter path creates regulatory arbitrage—allowing issuers to obtain a federal charter and effectively bypass state money transmitter licensing. From the CSBS perspective, the GENIUS Act should function as a regulatory floor, not a ceiling. As states including Georgia, Florida, and Delaware build out their own GENIUS-aligned frameworks, issuers face the prospect of overlapping and potentially conflicting compliance obligations.
For entities without a charter, the path is more opaque. The OCC’s NPRM includes a provision allowing nonbank entities with pending applications on or before the effective date to request a waiver of certain Section 4 requirements. But the mechanics of those waivers are tied to rules that do not yet exist in final form. The industry is effectively operating in a compliance-by-NPRM environment—preparing for requirements that could shift between proposal and finalization. With 137 days remaining, the clock is running. The statutory deadline remains fixed regardless of whether the rules catch up.