When US President Donald Trump signed the first major piece of legislation primarily addressing crypto issues into law in July 2025, it was just the latest step in a year-long campaign to get lawmakers to draft dedicated regulations for the crypto industry. The President’s signature on July 18, 2025 started a new process by federal regulators to define specific rules and explain how they would enforce those rules around stablecoins, which are themselves only a small segment of the broader overall crypto market.
Late. Bill Hagerty, a Republican representing Tennessee, introduced the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act – better known as the GENIUS Act – in February, kicking off the process for a law that would set rules for stablecoin issuers looking to do business in the US and direct federal banks and financial regulators to begin creating specific guidelines for these firms.
To be sure, Hagerty is among a group of lawmakers that included both Republicans and Democrats who drafted the bill, voted it out of committee, pushed it through the Senate and ultimately through the House of Representatives (which originally had its own stablecoin bill that was eventually dropped in favor of the Senate draft).
In remarks at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas earlier this year, Hagerty called the bill the most bipartisan product the Senate Banking Committee had produced in a decade.
“It’s taken a tremendous amount of work,” he said on the panel a few months before the bill’s passage. He argued that the bill would reduce counterparty risk, reduce transaction costs and lower the working capital required for operating receivables.
“If I think about the big selling points to my colleagues, the cost savings, the efficiency, it’s all good,” he said of the bill. “But if you think about what this does for dollar dominance around the world, the dollar has been the world’s reserve currency and we’ve seen a slow erosion of that. It’s going to turn the tables and move us back to the forefront.”
Already a fast-growing part of the crypto market, stablecoins continue to see new issuers enter the market and are expected to reach a market cap of nearly $2 trillion by the end of the decade, according to some analyses.
