OCC finalizes GENIUS Act stablecoin rule, drops rewards presumption

On October 21, 2026 at 7:00 a.m. Eastern Time (1:00 p.m. Paris time), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the US federal regulator of national banks, announced its final rule implementing the GENIUS Act, the federal law governing payment stablecoins. Issued under reference NR 2026-92, the rule takes effect on January 18, 2027, the same day as the law itself, according to Decrypt, The Block and Unchained.

The OCC is the first federal regulator to finalize its part of the framework, The Block and CoinDesk report, while other agencies are still working on theirs. The most closely watched element concerns yield paid on stablecoins: the final text drops the presumption mechanism included in the proposal and replaces it with a case-by-case review, without granting any exemption to existing rewards programs.

A first federal rule after a missed deadline

The GENIUS Act was signed into law in July 2025. The regulators responsible for implementing it missed the July 2026 deadline set for finalizing their rules, according to Decrypt. In August 2026, Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan V. Gould had announced a final rule for November. The OCC's proposed rule had been published in the Federal Register on March 2, 2026.

The rule covers permitted payment stablecoin issuers and foreign issuers that fall under the OCC's jurisdiction, as well as certain custody activities carried out by the entities it supervises, according to Crowdfund Insider, Decrypt and Unchained. Anti-money laundering requirements under the Bank Secrecy Act and sanctions compliance administered by OFAC are not part of it. They will be addressed in a separate rulemaking prepared with the Treasury.

“We are providing a clear, practical framework for payment stablecoin innovation, with strong standards for reserve backing, redemption, and risk management,” said Jonathan V. Gould, in remarks reported by The Block, Decrypt and Crowdfund Insider. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent welcomed the rule in the OCC's release and compared the GENIUS Act to the National Currency Act signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1863.

Rewards: presumption dropped, oversight retained

The GENIUS Act prohibits payments made “solely” because a customer holds, uses or retains a stablecoin. The OCC's proposal added a “rebuttable presumption”: certain arrangements between an issuer and third parties, such as affiliates or partners, were presumed to violate that ban. According to The Block, CoinDesk, Unchained and DefiPrime, the final rule removes this presumption.

Instead, the OCC will assess each arrangement case by case, based on the facts, and keeps its authority to act against attempts to evade the ban. The regulator also draws a conclusion from the word “solely”: an indirect payment motivated at least in part by something other than simply holding the stablecoin may fall outside the prohibition, CoinDesk and DefiPrime report.

Rewards programs launched before the law do not receive favorable treatment, however. “The OCC declines to presume that rewards programs that predated the GENIUS Act comply with the GENIUS Act,” the rule states, as quoted by CoinDesk and DefiPrime. Those programs therefore have no exemption.

The issue is contentious. Banks argue that stablecoin rewards risk drawing deposits away, which fuels a dispute with the crypto industry, Coinbase in particular, according to The Block and CoinDesk.

Redemptions: two business days and an alert threshold

On redemptions, issuers covered by the rule must honor requests within two business days at most, according to Unchained and DefiPrime. An alert mechanism sits alongside that deadline: if an issuer receives, within 24 hours, redemption requests exceeding 10% of the outstanding supply of a stablecoin brand, it must notify the OCC within 24 hours.

Questions still open

• The OCC has not set the date on which it will start accepting license applications from future issuers. It will announce it in a separate release.
• The publication date of the final rule in the Federal Register has not been disclosed.
• Several regulators, including the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the FDIC, have not yet finalized their own rules. According to CoinDesk, the full framework will probably not be in place by January 18, 2027.
• The announcements do not name any existing rewards program that would be deemed compliant: decisions will be made case by case.
• The Clarity Act, the crypto market structure bill, could still change the yield regime. Its passage remains uncertain.

What it means for traders

In the short term, the rule has no effect: it and the GENIUS Act only apply from January 18, 2027. After that date, yield or rewards paid on dollar stablecoins through US platforms would be neither banned outright nor guaranteed. With no exemption in place, existing programs could be modified or even discontinued if the OCC concluded that they evade the prohibition.

The OCC supervises issuers, not exchanges. CoinDesk nonetheless takes the view that exchanges will need to have their programs cleared, a reading based on the relationships between issuers and their partners. For customers of a platform such as Coinbase, the points to check would be the terms of the stablecoin rewards program: rate, eligibility by country of residence and any mention of a review in 2027.

For traders based outside the United States, the impact would be indirect. It would flow through US issuers and through platforms serving US customers. The GENIUS Act bars digital asset service providers from offering or selling to Americans stablecoins that do not come from a permitted issuer or from a foreign issuer meeting certain conditions. As long as the opening date for license applications remains unknown, the landscape of stablecoins authorized in the United States is still to be defined.

The redemption rules matter most to traders who use stablecoins as collateral or as a settlement currency in their crypto trading. For issuers supervised by the OCC, a maximum two-business-day deadline and a regulatory alert in the event of a wave of requests would frame liquidity risk. Finally, identity verification and asset freezing obligations tied to anti-money laundering and sanctions rules will come later, in the separate text being prepared with the Treasury.