GENIUS Act Rulemaking: FinCEN, OCC and the Real Timeline

In July 2025 the United States passed its first federal law dedicated to payment stablecoins. That text is signed and has not changed since. What has changed, month by month through 2026, is its rulemaking: the operational detail five separate federal agencies must still write before the law actually binds anyone in practice. That process, not the statute itself, sets the real timeline today.

At Soulbit Academy we already covered what the GENIUS Act is, its 1 to 1 reserve rules and its three authorization paths in The US GENIUS Stablecoin Act: What Changes for Latin American Companies. This article does not repeat that base. It is the update on where rulemaking stands as of August 2026, who is writing it and which exact date governs the effective date.

What an NPRM is and why the comment period sets the calendar

An NPRM, short for Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, is the formal rule proposal a US regulator publishes in the Federal Register to open it for public comment before turning it into a binding rule. It is not law or a rule in force; it is a draft. The typical process has three steps: publication of the NPRM, a comment period of 30 to 60 days during which any interested party (banks, issuers, companies, lawyers) can object or propose changes, and finally publication of a final rule, which is binding.

What exactly is an NPRM, and how is it different from a rule already in force?

It is a proposal with the weight of an official process, not yet a legal obligation. While an NPRM is open, no issuer is bound to comply with it; it only becomes enforceable once the regulator publishes the final rule, usually months later. Treating an NPRM as if it were already in force is the most common misreading of GENIUS Act news in 2026, because several agencies published their proposals within weeks of each other.

Who is writing the rules: OCC, FDIC, NCUA, FinCEN and OFAC

Five federal agencies are drafting GENIUS Act rulemaking, each for the segment of issuers it supervises. The OCC, the national bank supervisor, covers federally qualified nonbank issuers. The FDIC covers issuers affiliated with insured banks that are not national banks. The NCUA covers issuers affiliated with insured credit unions. The Federal Reserve has jurisdiction over issuers affiliated with the largest bank holding companies, though as of August 2026 it has not published its own NPRM. FinCEN and OFAC, both under Treasury, jointly regulate the anti-money laundering and sanctions program every authorized issuer must run, regardless of which licensing path it used.

Regulator	What it proposes and when it was published	Comment period status
OCC	NPRM on licensing, reserves and redemption, published March 2, 2026	Comments closed May 1, 2026; final rule still pending
FDIC	NPRM on requirements for issuers and insured institutions, approved April 7 and published April 10, 2026	Final rule still pending
NCUA	NPRM on licensing for issuers affiliated with insured credit unions, published May 18, 2026	Final rule still pending
FinCEN and OFAC	Joint NPRM on the anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance program, published April 10, 2026	Comments closed June 9, 2026; final rule still pending
Treasury (Section 3)	NPRM on who may issue and sell stablecoins to persons in the US, published August 18, 2026	Comments open until October 19, 2026

The FinCEN and OFAC anti-money laundering NPRM treats authorized issuers as financial institutions, with a sanctions compliance program that is mandatory for the first time for this type of entity. That requirement lines up with the FATF travel rule for crypto payments, which already applies in other markets a Latin American company operates in.

The Treasury NPRM published August 18, 2026 is different: it does not regulate issuers, but who may offer or sell stablecoins to persons in the US. It proposes that, starting July 18, 2028, a digital asset service provider could not offer a stablecoin to a person in the US unless it comes from an authorized issuer or a qualifying foreign issuer. It is the piece that most directly addresses the future status of stablecoins issued outside the United States.

The statutory July 2026 deadline passed without final rules

The GENIUS Act itself set a deadline for its regulators: one year from enactment, July 18, 2026, to publish their final implementing rules. That date arrived and passed without the OCC, FDIC, NCUA or Treasury publishing a single final rule. All of them were, and as of August 28, 2026 remain, at the NPRM or comment-review stage.

The law sets no penalty for missing that deadline: there is no clause suspending the legal framework or penalizing regulators. In practice, the rulemaking process has run longer than the statute originally scheduled, and the full-application date now depends almost entirely on the law's other mechanism: the dual trigger for the effective date.

The real timeline: the dual trigger toward January 18, 2027

The GENIUS Act does not set a single effective date. It sets two possible dates and applies whichever arrives first. The first is January 18, 2027, 18 months after the July 18, 2025 enactment. The second is 120 days after the primary regulators publish their final implementing rules. The law applies the earlier of the two, not the later one.

Milestone	Date	Status as of August 28, 2026
Law enacted	July 18, 2025	In force
Statutory deadline for final rules	July 18, 2026 (one year after enactment)	Passed with no final rules published
First effective-date trigger	January 18, 2027 (18 months after enactment)	Applies unless the second trigger occurs first
Second effective-date trigger	120 days after the primary regulators' final rules	Has not started running: no final rules exist

With rules still at the proposal stage in late August 2026, the second trigger would only fire if a regulator published its final rule before roughly mid September 2026, because 120 days after that would already fall later than January 18, 2027. The OCC's Comptroller has publicly stated an intent to have a final rule out around November 2026, but that is not an official commitment. Given the timeline of the other proposals, the most likely scenario, though unconfirmed in any official source, is that January 18, 2027 ends up being the real full-application date.

What changes in practice for a company collecting or holding US-issued stablecoins

The effect of this process on a company in Bogota, Mexico City or Sao Paulo remains indirect: the obligations fall on issuers, not on whoever collects or holds a balance in their stablecoin. But the rulemaking phase does change something concrete: public NPRMs now spell out what issuers will be required to do on reserves, redemption and compliance, even before those rules are final. A treasury team can read those drafts today to anticipate what to ask a counterparty.

What should a Latin American treasury ask its US counterparty today?

Three specific questions, all answerable today without waiting for final rules. First, which authorization path the issuer operates or plans to operate under: bank, federal nonbank via the OCC, or a state route certified as comparable. Second, whether it has already filed a formal license application and with which regulator. Third, how it currently publishes its monthly reserve composition, a requirement the law has imposed since it was signed in 2025.

For a company weighing USDC against USDT in its treasury, this rulemaking phase is also the moment to check which path each issuer is following, an analysis we develop in USDC vs USDT for companies. The distinction between fully licensed issuers and issuers still pending recognition becomes sharper as each NPRM advances or stalls.

What Soulbit delivers today against this framework, and what it does not

It is worth being precise about what a platform like Soulbit offers relative to this regulatory process, because issuing a stablecoin is not the same as operating a payment and treasury rail on top of stablecoins that already exist. Soulbit is not a stablecoin issuer: its V1 runs on USDC and USDT, fiat in USD, EUR and GBP, and a local banking rail only in Colombia, with KYB verification, institutional custody and AML and KYT monitoring. It supports batch and payroll payments, payment links, QR collection and conversion via quote on request, as we explain in what USDC is and how it works for companies.

That design means Soulbit does not need a GENIUS Act license to operate, because it does not issue its own stablecoins. It does depend, indirectly, on the USDC and USDT issuers it supports advancing through their own licensing process, since that determines how solid the underlying instrument is. Soulbit does not offer cards, yield or its own token, and it does not promise a full-application date for the law that no regulator has confirmed yet. That same caution applies to the timeline described in this article: it is a reading of official sources as of August 2026, not a promised date.

What is still undecided

Several points remain open. First, none of the five agencies has published a final rule, so everything in Table 1 can still change in the text ultimately adopted. Second, there is no official, binding date for those final rules: the November 2026 target mentioned by the OCC is a public statement, not a regulatory commitment. Third, Treasury's NPRM on who may sell stablecoins to persons in the US, published just on August 18, 2026, is still in its first weeks of comments, which suggests the overall process is still far from closing. Fourth, the determination of which foreign regulatory regimes are comparable for issuers outside the US, the piece that matters most for USDT's status, has also not been issued.

For regional context, while US rulemaking is still at the proposal stage, the European Union already has a stablecoin framework in force under MiCA, a contrast we develop in MiCA 2026 for Latin American companies.