Summary
- The GENIUS Act that governs U.S. stablecoin issuers is complicated and a work-in-progress, but now that its first anniversary is reached, Tether and other non-U.S. issuers have two years left to figure out their compliance strategies.
- The one-year mark was supposed to see the federal financial regulators finishing their stablecoin rules, but none have done so, yet, leaving some compliance uncertainty.
- The basic outlines of the U.S. standards, though, would force the most widely circulated coin — Tethers USDT — to make a lot of major changes before it could satisfy the law.
The world's leading stablecoin by volume, Tether's USDT, could be shoved out of the U.S. markets if the company doesn't revamp dramatically in the next two years.
Despite assurances last year from CEO Paolo Ardoino that the stablecoin giant would achieve U.S. compliance for USDT, the company hasn't yet revealed a sharp turn toward the demands of the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, which became law one year ago.
With that consequential anniversary of President Donald Trump's signing of the law passing on Saturday, the industry has marked a surge in stablecoin interest and issuance, plus a wide array of crypto and traditional financial firms pursuing U.S. trust bank charters to ease their stablecoin pathways. But the one-year mark was also supposed to be a deadline for federal financial regulators to have rules in place implementing GENIUS, and they've so far fallen short. That could be problematic as experts and industry insiders still reveal some disagreements over how the law should be interpreted.