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Jurisdictional snapshot · NAMERUpdated 2026-06-02

United States

Federal stablecoin perimeter set by GENIUS, market structure split between SEC and CFTC under CLARITY, tokenised deposits left to bank-led pilots, no retail CBDC.

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Recent developments

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Key institutions

Named institutions appear as the tracker fills.

The United States moved from the most fragmented stablecoin perimeter in the G7 to the most legislated within eighteen months. The GENIUS Act in 2025 fixed the federal perimeter for permitted payment stablecoin issuers, the CLARITY Act in late 2025 split market-structure jurisdiction between the SEC and CFTC, and the OCC's interpretive-letter pipeline reopened national-bank custody and stablecoin reserve activity. The result is a regime that is simultaneously the deepest in dollar liquidity and the most balkanised across agencies, with the Fed running tokenised deposit work through bank pilots rather than its own infrastructure. Compared with the EU's single MiCA stack or Hong Kong's two-agency split, the US is structurally messier, but the dollar gravity makes it the perimeter every other jurisdiction designs against.

Regulatory posture

Stablecoin policy under GENIUS authorises three issuer routes: subsidiaries of insured depository institutions, federally qualified non-bank issuers supervised by the OCC, and state-qualified issuers below a $10bn outstanding-issuance threshold above which they must transition to federal supervision. Reserves are restricted to cash, short-dated Treasuries, and repo; holder interest is prohibited; monthly attestation is the minimum cadence. The NYDFS limited-purpose trust charter survives alongside GENIUS as the federal preemption shell for in-scope issuers.

Market structure sits with the SEC and CFTC under CLARITY, which converged through House and Senate paths in late 2025. The Act defines digital-asset commodities versus securities, creates registration paths for digital-asset exchanges and broker-dealers, and allocates supervision so that secondary trading of digital-asset commodities sits with the CFTC while tokenised securities, ATS-traded instruments, and transfer-agent obligations remain with the SEC. The wrapper continues to determine fund-classification: BUIDL operates under section 3(c)(7) and is restricted to qualified purchasers, FOBXX is a 1940 Act registered government MMF, and the line between a tokenised fund interest and a payment stablecoin is enforced through investment-company status rather than naming. Retail CBDC has been effectively foreclosed by GENIUS.

Active pilots

  • GENIUS Act rollout. First federally qualified non-bank issuers and bank-subsidiary issuers under OCC supervision came into the perimeter through 2025 and early 2026. The crossover question is which NYDFS-chartered issuers transition to federal qualification versus remain at the state level under the sub-$10bn carve-out.
  • CLARITY Act implementation. SEC and CFTC running parallel rulemakings on digital-asset exchange registration, broker-dealer custody, and the digital-asset commodities perimeter.
  • NYDFS limited-purpose trust pipeline. Still the route a fast-moving non-bank issuer reaches for first.
  • Tokenised deposit pilots at GSIBs. Kinexys (the JPM stack, formerly Onyx) settles institutional dollar flows on a permissioned ledger; smaller bank consortia run parallel work without a Fed-operated bridge layer.

Regulators

The US federal tokenisation perimeter is split across four federal agencies, with the FDIC and the Treasury sitting alongside as load-bearing on bank insurance and on cross-cutting policy respectively. State regulators add a second layer where activity sits below federal preemption thresholds. The list below covers the agencies and their tokenisation-relevant remits.

  • SEC. The federal capital-markets regulator and the load-bearing supervisor for tokenised securities, tokenised investment-company products, and the transfer-agent and broker-dealer registrations that make the institutional tokenised-fund market work. SAB 121 (which had effectively blocked banks from offering crypto custody) was rescinded via SAB 122 in January 2025, BUIDL was approved through Securitize as the first scaled tokenised Treasury fund, and the CLARITY Act split market-structure jurisdiction with the CFTC in late 2025. The SEC retains tokenised securities, ATS rules, investment-company status of tokenised funds, and transfer-agent obligations under the post-CLARITY perimeter.

  • CFTC. The federal derivatives regulator, supervisor for secondary trading of digital-asset commodities post-CLARITY, and the agency whose August 2026 tokenised-collateral guidance produced the implementation pathway for DCMs (designated contract markets), DCOs (derivatives clearing organisations), and SEFs (swap execution facilities) to accept tokenised non-cash collateral including tokenised MMFs and tokenised Treasury bills. The Caroline Pham digital-asset markets agenda set the policy direction, with the Commission's posture more permissive than the prior-cycle SEC on permissioned-ledger experimentation.

  • OCC. The federal supervisor for national banks, federal savings associations, and federally licensed branches and agencies of foreign banks; the load-bearing US regulator for bank-money-on-chain. The OCC's interpretive-letter sequence (1170 crypto custody, 1172 stablecoin reserves, 1174 stablecoin payments, 1184 the trust-bank crypto-activities update) is the legal scaffolding under which JPMorgan operates Kinexys as a deposit-liability rail rather than a stablecoin issuer. The trust-bank chartering programme gives crypto-native firms a single federal alternative to 51 state licences; under GENIUS, federally qualified non-bank stablecoin issuers register with and are supervised by the OCC.

  • Federal Reserve. The US central bank and supervisor for state member banks and bank holding companies. The Fed's tokenisation surface has three load-bearing components: master account access for digital-asset-active banks (the structural gating decision that determines which entities can settle directly on Fedwire), the supervisory framework for bank digital-asset activities (with SR 22-6 and SR 23-7 rescinded in 2025 in favour of a risk-based framework), and the FedNow operational rail. As of April 2026 no OCC trust bank charter holder has been granted a master account on the basis of the charter alone.

  • FDIC. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation insures deposits at insured depository institutions and supervises state non-member banks. The FDIC was the joint signatory on SAB 121's effective practical implementation through bank examination and on the post-rescission supervisory recalibration via SAB 122. Under GENIUS, the FDIC is one of the three federal banking agencies (alongside the OCC and Federal Reserve) running the rule-making process on the implementing regulations; the FDIC's December 2025 proposed rule on payment-stablecoin issuance by subsidiaries of FDIC-supervised insured depository institutions is the worked example.

  • FinCEN. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network is the Treasury bureau that administers the Bank Secrecy Act, runs the federal AML and CTF perimeter, registers Money Services Businesses (MSBs), and operates the Travel Rule for funds transfers. Under GENIUS, permitted stablecoin issuers are designated financial institutions under the BSA with full AML, sanctions, and customer-identification obligations; FinCEN is the supervisor for these obligations.

  • US Treasury. The US Treasury is the GENIUS framework owner, the FSOC (Financial Stability Oversight Council) convener, and the parent of OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) which runs the sanctions perimeter. The Treasury Secretary chairs the Stablecoin Certification Review Committee that approves non-financial public companies wishing to issue payment stablecoins under GENIUS. The Treasury also sits at the policy table for cross-cutting digital-asset issues spanning banking, securities, and AML perimeters.

  • NYDFS. The New York Department of Financial Services is the load-bearing state regulator for digital-asset activity, operating both the BitLicense regime (a virtual-currency licence required for activities involving New York residents) and the limited-purpose trust charter (Paxos, Gemini, itBit lineage). The trust charter survives alongside GENIUS and remains the route most non-bank issuers operate under, with GENIUS providing the federal preemption shell for in-scope issuers.

  • Wyoming Division of Banking. The Wyoming Special Purpose Depository Institution (SPDI) charter is the state-level precedent for crypto-native bank charters, with Custodia Bank and Kraken Financial as the worked examples. The SPDI charter's federal-rails-access question (Custodia's denied master account application and the subsequent litigation) produced one of the few public decisions on Federal Reserve tier 3 access. The Wyoming SPDI route coexists with the OCC trust-bank charter route post-2026; the choice between them is a strategic call on federal-versus-state supervision and on the route to Fed master account access.

Open questions

  • How GENIUS preemption interacts with the surviving NYDFS limited-purpose trust route, and whether NYDFS-chartered issuers below the $10bn threshold are treated as state-qualified or sit on a parallel track entirely.
  • Whether the SEC treats tokenised MMFs sold to qualified institutional buyers as cash equivalents, or whether the 3(c)(7) wrapper keeps them in a separate bucket from payment stablecoins.
  • Whether the CFTC's post-CLARITY perimeter reaches tokenised commodity-referenced instruments (the EU ART analogue) and how that intersects with SEC jurisdiction over tokenised securities.
  • Whether the Federal Reserve authorises a FedNow-adjacent on-chain bridge for tokenised-deposit settlement, or whether wholesale tokenised-cash plumbing stays inside individual bank ledgers.
  • Whether GENIUS programmability and freeze powers leave room for AI agents holding payment stablecoins under delegated authority, or whether holder-identity requirements close that off.

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