The crypto industry often finds bankers involved in its top-priority regulatory efforts, and this time a coalition of banking trade associations has asked the US Treasury Department to extend the window in which the public can weigh in on the implementation of last year’s Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act.
In a letter sent this week to the Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., bankers in the U.S. are requesting that three different GENIUS Act rulemaking proposals be given extended comment periods at least 60 days after another rulemaking effort (at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) is completed. The OCC’s push to implement its rule policing stablecoin issuers is meaningful for the outcome of other rules being pursued by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), plus a related rulemaking at the FDIC.
All efforts are “directly dependent on the OCC’s final framework,” the bankers argue. The collective effort, in addition to legislative proposals yet to emerge from the Federal Reserve and other agencies, “represents a body of regulatory work of extraordinary scope and complexity.”
The banking organizations, including the American Bankers Association and the Bank Policy Institute, said their comments “will necessarily be more comprehensive and therefore more useful to the agencies if we have sufficient time to evaluate the proposed rules together and to evaluate each against the final OCC framework.”
The GENIUS Act is slated to be in place by 2027, although it is not unusual for federal agencies to grant extensions to comment periods on complex regulations. The Treasury did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the banking industry’s request.
The same bankers are also embroiled in a stablecoin-related debate with the crypto industry that has so far managed to delay the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act for months, potentially jeopardizing its potential to become law this year.
Read more: US Treasury proposes requirement that stablecoin firms be set up to monitor bad transactions
