Major US banking associations have formally requested a pause in the rulemaking process for the GENIUS Act, a comprehensive stablecoin regulation signed into law in July 2025. The American Bankers Association, the Bank Policy Institute, and two other trade groups sent a letter on April 22 to the Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, urging them to suspend the comment periods for three proposed implementation rules until the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency completes its primary stablecoin framework. The groups argue that Treasury’s equivalency rule, the FDIC’s issuer standards rule, and the FinCEN-OFAC anti-money laundering directive are all intricately linked to the OCC’s pending rule, making it impossible to provide meaningful feedback in isolation. The GENIUS Act is set to take effect no later than January 18, 2027.
Meanwhile, stablecoin issuer Agora has taken a different approach by filing for a national trust bank charter with the OCC on April 24. Agora CEO Nick van Eck commented that the banks’ pushback was predictable, noting that their true concern revolves around the potential exodus of deposits to stablecoin platforms that offer higher yields, which would erode the profit spread banks currently enjoy between near-zero deposit rates and returns from Federal Reserve reserves. Van Eck emphasized that obtaining a federal charter would enable Agora to issue stablecoins directly under federal oversight, bypassing what he describes as excessive fees in fiat-to-crypto conversion services, and would allow the company to expand into custody, compliance, and payment services.
The OCC released its proposed stablecoin rulebook in February 2026, addressing issuance, reserves, supervision, and redemption for permitted stablecoin issuers. That proposal had a 60-day comment period that ended on May 1. The Treasury separately proposed rules for state-level oversight of issuers under $10 billion, with a comment deadline of June 2. By seeking to align the three distinct timelines into a single coordinated process, banks could delay the GENIUS Act’s implementation by several months, giving traditional lenders more time to evaluate the competitive threat from nonbank stablecoin issuers before the regulations are finalized.