Three federal regulators have proposed rules that would force stablecoin issuers to operate like banks. The Treasury wants them to run anti-money-laundering and sanctions programs. The OCC wants weekly confidential reports and quarterly financial filings. The FDIC wants Bank Secrecy Act obligations applied to the issuers it supervises.
If adopted, issuing a dollar-pegged token will require customer screening, transaction monitoring, suspicious activity reporting, reserve disclosures, and a steady stream of data to a primary regulator. The next phase of stablecoin regulation is less about permission to issue a token and more about whether an issuer can carry the cost of being supervised like a financial institution.
Much of this formalizes what large issuers already do. But for smaller ones, the compliance burden will become the biggest barrier to entering a market now worth roughly $320 billion. The legal clarity the industry spent years fighting for came with an operating cost that decides who can realistically compete.
The GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025, created the federal framework for payment stablecoins. It lets a company issue these tokens only as a “permitted payment stablecoin issuer,” or PPSI, meaning issuers must be cleared by regulators under the federal regime. Treasury opened the rulemaking to fill in the details in late 2025; the proposals landing through 2026 turn that permission into a working compliance regime.
A stablecoin issuer’s product looks simple – one token equals one dollar – but the regulated version carries a long operational tail. Compliance now means teams and systems to identify customers, monitor transactions, screen wallets and counterparties against sanctions lists, flag suspicious behavior, and document it all for an examiner. That work moves from the edge of a crypto company to the center of the business.
The shift took concrete shape in April 2026, when Treasury’s FinCEN and OFAC issued a joint proposed rule that would treat permitted issuers as financial institutions under the Bank Secrecy Act and, for the first time, require a category of US persons to maintain an effective sanctions-compliance program. The FDIC followed on May 22 with a parallel rule for the issuers it supervises – those operating as subsidiaries of state nonmember banks and state savings associations.
All of this changes the cost structure of the business. The competitive edge moves toward compliance capacity. Issuers that can afford lawyers, transaction-monitoring vendors, reporting systems, and durable banking relationships hold an advantage. For smaller firms, the window is narrowing. The comment period on these proposals runs through August 2026; final rules could permanently reshape who gets to play in the $320 billion stablecoin market.
US agencies propose turning stablecoin issuers into pseudo-banks
New federal rules propose that stablecoin issuers must operate like banks, adding compliance costs such as customer screening and financial reporting. This regulation raises barriers for smaller stablecoin issuers in a market now worth $320 billion.