The US Treasury’s proposed rule on who may offer or sell payment stablecoins to people in the United States closes for comment on 19 October, and the notice puts it plainly. Comments on the NPRM must be received on or before October 19, 2026, under docket TREAS-DO-2026-0496, published 18 August.
The rule decides how the GENIUS Act’s prohibition works in practice, including how exchanges must treat coins issued outside the United States. Tether’s USDT, the largest at about $184 billion and the third-largest cryptocurrency of any kind, is the asset the question is really about. Two weeks remain for the firms carrying the obligation to say so on the record.
Two of these dates are statutory and one is a comment window that closes in two weeks. Source: GENIUS Act Regulations on Payment Stablecoin Issuance, Offer, and Sale, Federal Register · Chart: FinanceFeedsComments on Docket TREAS-DO-2026-0496 Close 19 October
The GENIUS Act was enacted on 18 July 2025 and the Act’s effective date is expected to be 18 January 2027, the statutory deadline. Treasury’s notice of proposed rulemaking fills in three definitions that decide who the statute reaches, covering what counts as issuing a payment stablecoin in the United States, what it means to offer or sell one to a person in the United States, and what digital asset service providers must do about foreign-issued coins.
Secretary Scott Bessent framed the exercise as a request rather than a draft decree when Treasury announced the proposal on 17 August, saying the department “welcomes input from stakeholders as we work to provide the regulatory certainty businesses need to innovate and grow in America.” The comment file is the mechanism for that, and 19 October is when it shuts.
Investor Takeaway
The rule defines who may sell payment stablecoins to US persons, which makes it the piece of GENIUS Act implementation that decides USDT’s access to US venues.
Exchanges Carry the 18 July 2028 Ban Under a Broad Definition
The hard date sits two years out. Beginning on 18 July 2028, three years after enactment, the GENIUS Act makes it “unlawful for a digital asset service provider to offer or sell a payment stablecoin to a person in the United States, unless the payment stablecoin is issued by a permitted payment stablecoin issuer.” The obligation lands on the venue rather than the token, which is what makes this rule the commercially consequential part of GENIUS Act implementation.
Treasury’s proposed definition of a digital asset service provider reaches any business that exchanges, transfers or acts as a custodian of digital assets, which is broad enough to cover exchanges, brokers and wallet custodians alike. From that date they must offer only qualifying issuers’ tokens, satisfy themselves that foreign issuers will comply with lawful orders under the GENIUS Act, and run reasonable due diligence on the representations they rely on.
Treasury also declined to treat issuers and service providers as mutually exclusive categories, reasoning that the contrary reading “could exempt persons who engage in significant payment stablecoin offer and sale activities.” A GENIUS Act issuer can therefore be a service provider at the same time.
Treasury Rejected Strict Liability and Kept a Safe Harbor for Foreign Issuers
The alternatives section is where the proposal’s direction of travel shows. Treasury considered deeming any issuance by a non-permitted issuer to a US person unlawful “regardless of whether the issuer knew or should have known that the recipient was actually located in the United States,” and declined it as overly strict. What survives instead is a safe harbor for foreign issuers who reasonably believed the recipient sat outside the United States, maintained policies against US issuance, and did not market to US persons.
Two further alternatives were set aside. Treasury rejected importing a securities-law frame, on the view that the GENIUS Act “evinces a clear intent for payment stablecoins to serve as an effective means of payment and settlement,” and it passed on a Regulation S style offshore-transaction test in favor of defining location by residency or incorporation. Each of those choices loosens rather than tightens the proposal, which is the context for anyone filing before 19 October. The GENIUS Act sets the prohibition; this rule sets how much room sits in front of it.
Tether’s Route Into the US Runs Through a Comparable-Regime Finding
A foreign issuer can reach US persons if it sits under a regulator whose regime the Treasury Secretary determines is comparable to the one the GENIUS Act builds, and if it registers with the OCC. That single determination is the whole question for USDT, and Tether has said for a year that it expects to clear it. US operations lead Bo Hines argued that both USDT and USAT “will meet the same compliance standards outlined in the GENIUS Act”, pointing to the Act’s reciprocity provision and saying the company expects the United States to apply it to Tether International.
Tether hedged anyway. It launched USAT on 27 January 2026 with Anchorage Digital Bank as the issuer, a domestically regulated token that chief executive Paolo Ardoino described as “a dollar-backed token made in America.” Bo Hines runs it as chief executive of Tether USAT, and the company that says it has 500 million users now has one token for the GENIUS Act regime and one for everywhere else.
That is the same hedge offshore issuers have been making since the law passed, and FinanceFeeds has tracked both the rebranding race under the new US rules and the reserve-composition risk hanging over USDT as 2028 approaches. Domestic issuers are not waiting either, with Fidelity rolling out FIDD for retail and institutional investors.
The GENIUS Act Is Law While Market Structure Sits at 5% on Polymarket
The contrast with the rest of the crypto legislative agenda is stark. Polymarket’s contract on whether crypto market structure legislation becomes law in 2026 trades at 5% as of Monday, down from around 50% in mid-September, on a thin $27,682 of volume. That market excludes the GENIUS Act by its own rules, since it covers only legislation that sets a comprehensive framework beyond stablecoins.
The contract covers comprehensive market-structure legislation and excludes stablecoin-only bills such as the GENIUS Act. Source: PolymarketStablecoin rules are arriving on a fixed calendar while the broader framework stalls. The GENIUS Act already produced Federal Reserve proposals on reserves and capital in late September, and Treasury’s offer-and-sale rule is one of several GENIUS Act implementations running in parallel, each with its own docket and deadline. Anyone tracking the file needs the docket number rather than the statute name. For exchanges weighing whether to keep listing USDT past July 2028, the opening the SEC and CFTC gave spot crypto trading matters less than one Treasury determination about a foreign regulator, and the window to argue about how that determination gets made closes on 19 October.
Investor Takeaway
USDT’s access to US venues after 18 July 2028 rests on a Treasury finding that a foreign regulator’s regime is comparable, plus OCC registration, rather than on anything Tether can do alone.