OCC Promises Final Rule for GENIUS Act by November

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) will have a final rule implementing the GENIUS Act out by November, Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan V. Gould said Wednesday (Aug. 19) at the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium.

“We were working on the rule even before the President actually signed the bill into law,” Gould said, according to excerpts released by the OCC. “We will have a final rule out by November, so we are working with great speed here.”

“We are witnessing the birth of a new industry in the form of payment stablecoins,” Gould said.

PYMNTS reported in July 2025 that when President Donald Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law, the Act became the country’s first-ever piece of crypto legislation and signaled a potential new era for crypto, or at least stablecoins, in the United States.

The OCC said in February that it issued a proposed rulemaking to implement the GENIUS Act and that the proposed rule addresses most of the regulations the OCC is required to implement under the GENIUS Act.

In June, the OCC issued a proposed rulemaking that would require permitted payment stablecoin issuers under its supervision to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act and sections of the GENIUS Act.

Gould said Wednesday that the OCC’s role in the regulatory and supervisory landscape around stablecoins is similar to the regulator’s original mission when it was created in the 1860s: ensuring that the reserve assets backing national bank-issued notes were of the same level of quality.

“That’s exactly analogous to what Congress has tasked us with doing with respect to payment stablecoins,” Gould said.

Among the 40 applications for new bank charters that the OCC has received over the last 18 months, since Trump took office, 23 include business plans that involve some form of digital asset activity, Gould said.

“So that tells you about where the puck is going,” Gould said. “We are now seeing when we look out further, when I look out further to the pipeline of potential applicants for bank charters, it is becoming ordinary course to involve and integrate payment stablecoins, etc., in the business plans that we are now seeing presented to the OCC for consideration.”