The cryptocurrency industry frequently finds bankers involved in its top-priority regulatory efforts, and this time, a coalition of banking trade associations has asked the US Treasury Department to expand the window in which the public can weigh in on the implementation of last year’s Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act.
In a letter sent this week to the Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, U.S. bankers are calling for three different GENIUS Act rule proposals to get extended comment periods, at least 60 days after another rulemaking effort ends (at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency). The OCC’s push to implement its rule to police stablecoin issuers is significant to the outcome of other rules being pursued at Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), as well as related rulemaking at the FDIC.
All efforts “depend directly on the OCC’s final framework,” bankers maintain. The collective efforts, plus regulatory proposals that have yet to emerge from the Federal Reserve and other agencies, “represent a body of regulatory work of extraordinary scope and complexity.”
Banking organizations, including the American Bankers Association and the Banking Policy Institute, said their comments “will necessarily be more complete, and therefore more useful to the agencies, if we have sufficient time to evaluate the proposed rules together and evaluate each of them against the OCC’s finalized framework.”
The GENIUS Act is supposed to be in effect in 2027, although it is not unusual for federal agencies to grant extensions to comment periods on complex rules. The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the banking industry’s request.
The same bankers are also embroiled in a stablecoin-related debate with the crypto industry that has so far managed to delay the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act for months and potentially jeopardize its potential to become law this year.
Read more: US Treasury proposes requiring stablecoin companies to monitor bad transactions
