What happened
- Specific facts/numbers: The OCC’s final GENIUS Act rule takes effect on January 18, 2027; the article says the final package runs to more than 700 pages, cuts the proposed daily liquidity requirement to 5% from 10%, removes the floated 30% weekly liquidity requirement, and drops the proposed 20-day weighted-average-maturity cap. It also says issuers can hold the balance in Treasuries out to 93 days if they assess that as sufficient for liquidity risk.
- Institutions involved: The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is the rulemaker. The story concerns stablecoin issuers subject to the GENIUS Act framework, including issuers holding reserves in Treasuries, using repo for liquidity, and relying on custodians or self-custody arrangements.
- Regulatory/technical context: Ledger Insights says the final rule materially softens the OCC’s February proposal on reserve liquidity, concentration, and maturity. It reports that a proposed 50% cap on daily-liquidity exposure to a single institution was removed, while a broader 40% single-institution exposure cap remains but now has exclusions for government exposures, centrally cleared repo, self-held assets, and qualifying custodians; the rule also explicitly allows an issuer to custody 100% of its own assets.
- What to watch next: Watch for market and legal analysis of how far the looser reserve standards change issuer balance-sheet design before the January 18, 2027 effective date. No more specific next milestone was identified in the text read.
Why it matters
The final rule appears to give U.S. stablecoin issuers more flexibility on reserve composition, custody, and yield-related product design, which could lower compliance friction and affect how issuers compete on liquidity management.
HKMA Relevance
Direct: Another monetary authority has taken a concrete regulatory action on stablecoins, a payments-related area within the HKMA’s remit, so the move is plausibly relevant for Hong Kong’s own supervisory assessment of stablecoin reserve standards.