As companies turn their attention to the new year, corporate treasurers in the United States will be marking their 2026 calendars for milestones in the long-awaited quest for mainstream stablecoin adoption, including the key federal regulations that may confirm practicality in various would-be use cases.
What is certain already is that the US under President Donald Trump’s administration has taken steps to enable the creation of a stablecoin supervision framework. The recently passed GENIUS Act guarantees, for the first time, an array of federally regulated stablecoins that must be backed one-for-one by US dollars and equivalent low-risk assets.
Federal agencies that oversee the banking sector are due to issue their GENIUS Act-related regulations by July. The law will take effect six months after that.
Reed Luhtanen, Chief Executive Officer with the US Faster Payments Council, said most participants in the cash management space expect a greater comfort level with the idea that stablecoin can play a role in everyday business transactions. At least, now there is a playing field with a regulatory backstop.
“The GENIUS Act creates more certainty for would-be participants within that space where there was uncertainty before,” Luhtanen told Treasury Today Group in early December. “The clarity wasn’t there for them to understand with is permissible.”
Stablecoin use cases were a topic of conversation during multiple panels at The Clearing House Annual Conference in November. As stablecoin and tokenised deposits evolve from the theoretical to money-in-transit usage and now towards mainstream adoption, various value propositions and operational risks were mentioned for the banking system and the payments community.
Applications range from settlements and collateral to B2B peer-to-peer and international remittances. Ultimately, there is optimism that stablecoins can be an important enabler of instant payments, according to panellists. The initial regulations will be a catalyst for understanding the role of traditional payment rails, interoperability between financial institutions and relationships between the digital coins and the fiat currencies and crypto.
“I think there is some momentum behind the idea of creating semi-closed, or semi-open, ecosystem … to do business with each other,” Luhtanen said later. “We’re at a stage where we are going to see a lot more variety in the things that are tried. … The use case that [participants] keep circling back to is cross border.”
For corporate treasurers, the adoption of stablecoin, together with AI deployment, has the potential to ease a variety of back-office functions. For more details and certainty, however, participants need to wait for the next stage of GENIUS Act implementation, ie, the precise regulations that federal agencies formulate based on the legislation.
The GENIUS Act, formally the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act, was signed by President Donald Trump in July. The legislation’s timeline for federal agencies to issue rules was designated as one year after passage.
That means much, but not all, of the US stablecoin playing field will be revealed by the summer of 2026, James Fuchs, Vice President of the Supervision, Credit and Learning Division at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, wrote in a payment-stablecoin article posted on his Fed region’s website this month.
The one-year deadline applies to the Fed, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the National Credit Union Administration, Fuchs noted.
“This included establishing a regulatory framework, implementing capital, liquidity and risk management requirements and developing diversification standards for the reserve assets backing an issuer’s stablecoins,” Fuchs wrote.
However, the law “also requires federal stablecoin regulators at the Treasury Secretary to issue several reports – some within one year of enactment and others on an ongoing basis,” he added.
So, corporate treasurers, mark your calendars. The GENIUS Act was signed on 18th July 2025. The regulations from the agencies are therefore due by 18th July 2026. The law formally goes into effect on 18th January. Except, if all the regulations are finished at some date before 18th July, they may take effect 120 days after that instead of waiting until 18th January.
