Tether's two-year $GENIUS clock ticks while Circle sprints 🕒

Tether's $USDT faces a two-year countdown to align with U.S. stablecoin rules under the $GENIUS Act, the law signed by President Donald Trump one year ago on Saturday that could push the token off American platforms if the issuer does not overhaul its reserves. The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act, which became law one year ago, requires issuers to be fully backed by the most highly liquid and reliable assets, essentially cash and U.S. Treasuries, yet Tether's most recent disclosures indicate as much as a quarter of $USDT's reserves remain in assets that would not meet that standard, including precious metals, lending and bitcoin ($BTC $64,348.58) holdings.

One year after enactment, federal financial regulators had been expected to have implementing rules in place under $GENIUS, but they have so far fallen short, and experts and industry insiders continue to disagree over how the statute should be interpreted. Tether, headquartered in El Salvador, did not respond to multiple recent requests for an update on its compliance posture. CEO Paolo Ardoino told CoinDesk at the White House, in the moments after Trump signed $GENIUS, that "Tether will comply with the $GENIUS Act," adding then that the company would pursue a separate U.S.-specific token while managing $USDT to meet the law's foreign-issuer standards; a compliance update has not been disclosed.

Tether's chief rival, U.S.-based Circle, has made a more visible push to pre-comply with the forthcoming domestic requirements, while a handful of other issuers, including World Liberty Financial, the company tied to President Donald Trump, compete for a distant third place in stablecoin market share. Coinbase, the largest U.S. exchange, declined to discuss its stablecoin listing plans under $GENIUS, with the exchange and much of the rest of the crypto industry shifting policy attention toward a separate legislative effort, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act.

That broader market-structure bill, intended to complement $GENIUS by regulating U.S. crypto markets, passed the House last year alongside the stablecoin law but is still languishing in the final weeks of its potential 2026 path, leaving the industry's planned one-two punch incomplete. In the meantime, a wide array of crypto and traditional financial firms have pursued U.S. trust bank charters to ease their stablecoin pathways as issuance has surged in the year since $GENIUS became law.