Circle · Federal Reserve (FED) · CryptoSlate
GENIUS made stablecoins legal, July 18 decides which stablecoins stay competitive
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The GENIUS Act's one-year rulemaking deadline lands on July 18, and markets have mostly priced it as a legitimacy milestone for stablecoins.
Key facts
- DeFiLlama puts the total stablecoin market cap at around $311.5 billion, and the two largest issuers, USDT at $184.4 billion and USDC at $73.3 billion, already control roughly 80% of it
- At 3.74%, the current secondary-market yield on 3-month Treasury bills, a $200 million stablecoin generates about $7.5 million in gross reserve income per year
- The same $15 million bill against a $10 billion issuer's roughly $374 million in gross reserve income comes to about 4% of revenue
- Circle's own USDC page lists $73.7 billion in circulation as of June 29, and the company holds those reserves in cash and cash equivalents, mostly through the Circle Reserve Fund, an SEC-registered
Summary
01 July 18 starts GENIUS rulemaking, forcing stablecoin issuers into federal compliance requirements for reserves, audits, licensing, and AML. 02 The law could favor large issuers, because fixed compliance costs hit mid-sized players far harder than giants. 03 Issuers under $10 billion can use state oversight, but crossing that line starts a 360-day federal transition clock. Mike McCluskey, CEO of tx, and Zaheer Ebtikar, chief strategy officer at Plasma, read it as a cost-visibility event that decides which issuers can afford to keep operating.