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| The regulator in charge of America’s biggest banks wrote the first stablecoin rule, and the banks it oversees are already fighting it. |
The OCC finished the first stablecoin rule. Banks objected.
On Wednesday the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates America's national banks, published the first final rule under the GENIUS Act. That is the federal stablecoin law, and no other agency has finished a rule under it yet. The rule takes effect on January 18.
The GENIUS Act became law in July 2025 and it bans stablecoin issuers from paying interest to the people who hold their coins. Circle, the company that issues USDC, can't pay you for holding it. The law didn't say whether anyone else could. Coinbase pays rewards on USDC balances out of its own revenue, and the draft rule carried a presumption that arrangements like that were a way around the ban.
The final rule drops the presumption. The OCC declined to rule on third-party rewards, which leaves the exchanges paying them where they were. An issuer with a substantially complete application in front of the OCC can ask for a temporary waiver while it finishes complying.
The American Bankers Association answered the same day and accused the OCC of undermining Congress. The banks' complaint is about deposits. A dollar earning rewards in a stablecoin at an exchange isn't sitting in a checking account, and the banks pushed for the interest ban for exactly that reason.
The banks now take the fight over stablecoin yield to three other agencies. The Fed, the FDIC and the Treasury still have their own GENIUS rules to write, and any one of them could take the harder line the OCC passed on.
If you earn rewards on USDC or another dollar stablecoin at an exchange, nothing changes for you today, and the first regulator to rule left your rewards alone. Stablecoin supply is $305.7 billion this morning. Rewards are a large part of why that money sits on-chain rather than in a bank, and three more regulators now decide whether it stays.
Tesla and SpaceX explore a merger holding 30,221 bitcoin
Elon Musk said on Wednesday that Tesla and SpaceX are exploring a merger. Each company has appointed a board committee to consider it, and it would be the largest deal in corporate history. SpaceX shares rose 7.8% and Tesla's rose 3.4%. Musk says no terms have been agreed.
Between them the two companies have disclosed 30,221 bitcoin. That total would rank sixth among the public companies CoinGecko tracks. The same coins would sit on one balance sheet instead of two.
That matters because the companies that buy bitcoin for their balance sheets have gone quiet. Glassnode estimates they have added less than a tenth of their November 2024 pace every month since June, at an average cost near $80,200 a coin. Bitcoin is $82,900 this morning. A merger makes a bigger holder without anyone buying a new coin, and new buyers are what the price is short of.
Solana now settles a transaction in 150 milliseconds
Alpenglow went live on Solana on Wednesday afternoon. Anza, the developer firm behind Solana's main software, built it. It replaces the voting system the chain's validators have used since 2020 to agree on which transactions count. The time for a transaction to become final, meaning it can't be reversed, falls from about 12.8 seconds to about 150 milliseconds.
The same day Western Union picked a Solana stablecoin for part of its remittance business. Recipients of its Receiver Redirect payouts will collect USDPT, a dollar token issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, in more than 60 currencies and over 200 countries.
SOL was $105.52 at our overnight reading, down 0.7%. The upgrade had been on the calendar for weeks, so there wasn't much in it for the price to react to. What SOL holders get to check now is whether 150 milliseconds holds up under a full day of real traffic.
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Viv’s Notebook
Why institutional adoption isn’t the same as decentralization
BlackRock, Fidelity and J.P. Morgan are now deeply involved in digital assets, and plenty of crypto investors would call that a win. In this week’s Notebook, Viv explains why he thinks Wall Street adopting crypto is a different thing from crypto achieving what it set out to do, and why the question that matters is who ends up controlling the financial system of the future.
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The OCC went first on stablecoins; the Fed, the FDIC and the Treasury still have their turn, and the banks will be waiting for them.
TC
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| This is The Crossover. We read the regulator’s rule so you don’t have to; which rewards you chase, and from whom, is your call, and we’d rather you read the small print first. |
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