US quietly eases stablecoin reserve rules as banks warn billions could shift away from lending

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent compared the GENIUS Act to the National Currency Act of 1863 on Oct. 21, the day the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released its 721-page stablecoin final rule.

He called the law a cornerstone of America's position as the world's crypto capital.

The American Bankers Association (ABA) responded the same day, saying the final rule gives indirect stablecoin rewards room and invites deposit flight that would weaken bank lending.

As Eleanor Terrett reported, the ABA said:

“Attempting to address deposit flight and economic harm after it has occurred is the wrong approach.”

The 1863 law standardized money issued by national banks, and the new rule standardizes money issued by a new class of regulated payment stablecoin issuers.

The OCC left the statute's ban on issuers paying interest or yield for holding or using their tokens in place. It dropped a proposed rebuttable presumption aimed at rewards routed through affiliates and intermediaries, and it chose case-by-case review while declining to exempt existing rewards programs.

The ABA objects to that choice, and the defensible description is that the rule lets third-party reward arrangements be judged one at a time.

Comptroller Jonathan Gould's emphasis ran to reserve backing, redemption standards and risk management. A quieter set of edits in those same reserve provisions decides where the money behind a digital dollar sits.

The OCC cut the minimum immediately available liquidity from 10% of reserves to 5%. It dropped a proposed insured-deposit allocation of 0.5% of reserves, capped at $500 million, for issuers with at least $25 billion outstanding.

It also removed a restriction that capped required daily liquidity at 50% in any one eligible institution, and it declined to require issuers to place reserves with community banks. Full backing stays in place, with reserve value required to match outstanding issuance.

A hypothetical issuer with $100 billion of stablecoins shows the scale. The immediate-liquidity floor falls from $10 billion to $5 billion, and the separate $500 million insured-deposit requirement falls to zero.

A separate 40% cap on exposure to any single counterparty survives with its exceptions, so removing the daily-liquidity limit keeps a ceiling on concentration.

The 5% can be met with demand deposits, other deposits withdrawable at any time, on-demand share accounts, or money credited to a Federal Reserve Bank account.

That makes the $5 billion difference a statement about the form of liquidity, and an issuer's eligibility for Fed account access depends on its own eligibility.

Take a hypothetical 24-hour run of $12 billion in redemptions against an issuer holding the minimum. The shortfall to cover from other sources is $2 billion under the proposed floor and $7 billion under the final one. The OCC expects issuers to monetize assets quickly and submit to stress testing.

The agency argued that high-quality assets, including Treasury securities, can be sold quickly, and spreading insured deposits across many institutions adds operational complexity, counterparty exposure, and settlement-access constraints.

The OCC identifies two risks pointing in opposite directions for community banks. Local banks could lose deposits to stablecoins, and large issuer balances could carry their own liquidity risks, so the OCC declines to require the relationship for either side.