OCC's Final Stablecoin Rule Drops the Yield Presumption It Proposed

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency finalized its first rule under the GENIUS Act on Wednesday, and the most consequential change is something it took out. A proposal published on 25 February would have presumed that yield running through an affiliate or a related third party breached the law's ban on issuer-paid interest. That presumption is gone from the final text. The ban itself stands, and the rule takes effect on 18 January 2027. Bulletin 2026-50 carries the rule; a second bulletin issued the same day sets out how to apply and who may ask for a waiver.

What the ban still covers

The statutory wording is narrow and the OCC left it alone. A permitted issuer may not pay interest or yield "solely because a customer holds, uses, or retains its stablecoin", in the phrasing Bitcoin.com News carried on Wednesday morning. The prohibition reaches institutional holders as well as retail ones, that account adds. What changes is how a supervisor reaches a violation. With the presumption dropped, each arrangement is read on its own structure, and the burden sits with the examiner instead of the issuer. Cointelegraph, publishing at 12:26 UTC, reported that the OCC keeps its authority to act against evasion. Crypto News Flash quotes the rule as saying that interest does not stop being interest because it is given a different name. No other account read here carries that line.

No grandfathering for the rewards programmes

Three accounts name the same three companies. Blockonomi, Coinfomania and U.Today all say the rewards programmes at Coinbase, PayPal and Kraken now face case-by-case review. Coinfomania's summary: "Existing yield programs receive no automatic grandfathering or safe harbor." CoinDesk's framing, carried in an aggregation at 11:50 UTC, is that the industry gets no safe harbors for existing programmes. Bitcoin.com News names no company at all. One phrase is doing two jobs across these accounts. Rewards programmes get no safe harbor. The approval requirement has a waiver, and that is a different provision entirely.

Twelve months, and only from one requirement

Bulletin 2026-51 is where that waiver sits. From 18 January a person generally must be approved as a permitted payment stablecoin issuer before issuing, and issuing without that status carries criminal penalties the bulletin does not quantify. Section 15.30(g) lets an issuer with a substantially complete pending application request a waiver in writing, under section 5(f) of the Act, for a period "not to exceed 12 months beginning on January 18, 2027". The OCC writes that it generally expects to grant those requests for existing issuers. Firms not already operating in the United States get no such expectation, and the OCC says it has identified no compelling reason to waive anything beyond the approval requirement, so reserve, redemption and risk-management duties bind from day one. Applications open only once the Office of Management and Budget clears the related information collection.

"We are providing a clear, practical framework for payment stablecoin innovation," Comptroller Jonathan Gould said in a post on the day of the rule.

Three things the rule leaves to somebody else

Anti-money-laundering, Bank Secrecy Act and OFAC screening duties are not in this text. The OCC will write those with the Treasury Department separately, on no stated date. The reserve and redemption floors come through from the statute: reserves at least equal to the stablecoins outstanding, and redemption generally processed within two business days, both as Cointelegraph reported them. How many people wrote in is not established. The OCC says only that it received comments from various groups and individuals, Blockonomi says hundreds, and no account read here prints a number. The bulletin numbers do not line up either. Crypto News Flash attributes the rule to bulletins 2026-51 and 2026-52, while the OCC's own pages give 2026-50 for the rule and 2026-51 for the waivers. A direct check found no 2026-52, and we could not reconcile the two. One Act needs several agencies' rules, and this follows Treasury's own rule on who may issue. The same account has the FDIC and the National Credit Union Administration yet to finalize theirs, which no second outlet confirms.