S. 1582 — GENIUS Act

Executive Summary30-second read

S. 1582, the GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins), is the first federal framework for payment stablecoins. The Senate passed it 68–30 on June 17, 2025; the House passed it 308–122 on July 17; and it became Public Law 119-27 the next day. The law itself is settled.

What the data shows

• The vote was bipartisan; the rulemaking is unanimous-but-divided. An all-Republican cosponsor list (5 senators) produced a 68–30 / 308–122 bipartisan enactment. Now the conflict is technocratic, not partisan.
• One provision is doing most of the damage: the interest/yield prohibition (Sec. 4(a)(11)). Community banks and state regulators want it read broadly to stop deposit flight; crypto firms want it read narrowly to preserve rewards and loyalty programs.
• The big-bank trade associations that skipped HR 3633 showed up here. ABA, the Bank Policy Institute, CBA, ICBA, CSBS, State Street and Fidelity are all on the GENIUS record — confirming the pattern PoliStack flagged on market structure: banks concede market structure and fight stablecoins.
• The path to enactment was underwritten by crypto money. The crypto super PAC Defend American Jobs spent ~$40M electing cosponsor Bernie Moreno in 2024 — in a race decided by 3.6 points.
• It nearly died once. The Senate’s first cloture vote failed 48–49 before the bill was renegotiated — a reminder that the bipartisan margin was manufactured, not given.

Bottom line

Where it stands todayLive

GENIUS is enacted law. The active question is implementation: Treasury/FinCEN, the OCC, FDIC, NCUA, and the SEC are translating the statute into binding rules, and the comment record is where every regulated party is now fighting for its preferred reading. Several windows remained open as of mid-2026.

Legislative timeline

What the law doesSummary

The GENIUS Act establishes the first federal licensing-and-supervision regime for payment stablecoins — digital tokens pegged to the dollar and redeemable on demand. It creates a category of “permitted payment stablecoin issuers,” sets reserve, redemption, and disclosure requirements, and splits oversight between federal banking regulators and qualifying state regimes. It is the stablecoin counterpart to the House’s market-structure bill (HR 3633, the CLARITY Act) — together the core of the 119th Congress’s crypto package.

Key points for industry & policy readers

• Reserve and redemption rules are the core. Issuers must hold high-quality liquid reserves against tokens and honor redemption — the provisions most of the rulemaking detail now turns on.
• The interest/yield prohibition (Sec. 4(a)(11)) is the contested heart. The statute bars issuers from paying interest to holders. What counts as “interest,” “pay,” and “solely” — and whether affiliated platforms can route rewards around it — is the central rulemaking fight.
• Dual federal/state architecture. Issuers can be supervised federally (OCC, FDIC, NCUA, Fed) or under a state regime certified “substantially similar” to the federal framework — itself the subject of a dedicated Treasury rulemaking.
• AML/CFT is a parallel track. FinCEN and the banking regulators have a cluster of proposed rules imposing sanctions-compliance and anti-money-laundering obligations on permitted issuers.
• Foreign issuer access is conditional. Foreign stablecoins may enter U.S. markets only where the home regime meets GENIUS standards — a comparability determination delegated to the agencies.
• The deposit-franchise question is unresolved by design. Whether dollars migrate from insured bank deposits into stablecoins depends almost entirely on how the interest prohibition is implemented — which is why community banks are fighting it line by line.

Sponsor, cosponsors & the vote6 senators

S. 1582 carried just five cosponsors — all Republican — including Banking Chair Tim Scott and crypto lead Cynthia Lummis. Unlike HR 3633’s engineered bipartisan cosponsor sheet, GENIUS’s bipartisanship showed up only at final passage: 68–30 in the Senate and 308–122 in the House mean heavy Democratic crossover that the cosponsor list never advertised.

Hagerty, Bill (R-TN)

Sponsor · Senate Banking

Lead sponsor; also filed predecessors S. 919 and S. 394.

Scott, Tim (R-SC)

Senate Banking Chair

Holds the gavel on the committee of jurisdiction.

Lummis, Cynthia (R-WY)

Banking · crypto lead

The Senate's most vocal crypto advocate.

Moreno, Bernie (R-OH)

Banking

Won a 3.6% race in 2024 with $40M+ in crypto super-PAC support.

Ricketts, Pete (R-NE)

—

Up for a full term in 2026.

Sullivan, Dan (R-AK)

—

Lowest party-loyalty of the cosponsor set.

The vote record

The rulemaking fightCenterpiece

Congress wrote the statute and handed the consequential choices to the agencies. Five regulators have issued 14 implementing rules. The headline magnet was Treasury’s advance notice, which drew 378 comments; a cluster of AML/CFT and state-comparability rules followed into 2026, several with comment windows still open in mid-2026.

The 14 implementing rules

The fight is mostly about one provision: the interest prohibition

Strip away the procedural comments and the substantive record collapses onto Section 4(a)(11) — the bar on issuers paying interest or yield to holders. Two camps read it in opposite directions, and the stakes are the bank deposit base.

Who’s commenting — and what it tells us~95 orgs

PoliStack entity-resolved and stance-classified the organizations on the GENIUS rulemaking record. The result is a map of who is fighting for what — and the most striking feature is how little daylight there is on the law itself.

The two camps at the table

The same crypto/payments and incumbent-finance interests that fought over the statute are now both on the rulemaking record. Notably, the big-bank associations that were absent from HR 3633 are present in force here.

Money & lobbyingHow we got here

The regulatory fight is the present tense; the campaign-finance and lobbying record is the back-story of how a partisan cosponsor list produced a bipartisan law.

The headline: $40M elected a cosponsor

In 2024, the crypto super PAC Defend American Jobs spent ~$40.1M in independent expenditures supporting Bernie Moreno (R-OH), who won by 3.6 points and then cosponsored S. 1582. It is the clearest instance of the “fund the candidate, then write the bill” pattern PoliStack documented on HR 3633 — at single-candidate scale.

Lobbying dollars: who registered on the bill

At least 26 registrants named the GENIUS Act in their federal Lobbying Disclosure Act filings between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026, reporting roughly $65M in total lobbying across those filings. The spending is lopsided: payment networks and banks dwarf the crypto industry. Visa alone reported $13.6M and the American Bankers Association $10.7M — each more than the entire crypto/fintech column combined.

Registrant → client detail

Also on the GENIUS lobbying record (dollar amount not captured in the graph): Block, Inc. · Stripe · Managed Funds Association · The Clearing House Assn. (via Sullivan & Cromwell) · Chamber of Digital Commerce (via Chapman & Cutler) · Unicoin (via King & Spalding).