Just about one year after the GENIUS Act was signed on July 18, 2025, the stablecoin market it regulates has grown to roughly $314–323 billion in circulation and offshore issuers have started
Just about one year after the GENIUS Act was signed on July 18, 2025, the stablecoin market it regulates has grown to roughly $314–323 billion in circulation and offshore issuers have started moving in.
Nathan McCauley, co-founder and CEO of Anchorage Digital, a federally chartered bank issuing many of those on shore coins, joined TheStreet Roundtable to help build a scorecard for the law.
Anchorage received the first Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) national trust charter granted to any crypto firm, and is now the first federally chartered bank to issue stablecoins under direct OCC supervision.
McCauley argued that this bill gave the industry what it needed most: legitimacy.
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McCauley sees the credibility as the biggest impact GENIUS has had since becoming law.
"What the bill got right most fundamentally was legitimizing our entire industry,” he said. “Now there is settled federal law that says here are the rules for stablecoins, here are the rules for reserves."
Those rules include holding 1:1 reserves in short-term treasuries or dollars, submitting to audits, and obtaining licenses from federal and local governments.
Watch the full interview exclusively on Roundtable!
Stablecoins, as a regulated product, also help shift the perspective the general public has about the crypto space writ large away from memecoins and speculative trading towards serious financial infrastructure and products.
"If stablecoins are legitimate, then blockchains are legitimate. You can surmise that the apps built on top of those blockchains are also legitimate. That whole stack of stuff we've been building for the last 10 years was in many ways validated,” McCauley explained.
Stablecoins have achieved more mainstream usage than any crypto product. They settled about $33 trillion in 2025, more than Visa and Mastercard’s combined $25 trillion. A survey conducted by Fireblocks found that nearly 50% of businesses who responded are already using stablecoins for various types of payments.
The biggest three stablecoin issuers globally are Tether, Circle, and Sky (formerly MakerDAO). Circle is the only US native business of these, and issues USDC. Before GENIUS, they dealt with multiple investigations from the SEC. Today, the threat of lawfare is minimal.
Tether, officially headquartered in El Salvador, launched USAT in January 2026, specifically built for GENIUS’ framework and for which Anchorage is the regulated issuer.
"We've seen two out of the top three players within the stablecoin ecosystem choose to move onshore. Tether decided to launch USAT here within the US. We are the regulated issuer for USAT,” McCauley said.
Ethena, a smaller but still significant player in the stablecoin space, has also selected Anchorage as the issuer for their GENIUS compliant stablecoin, USDtb.
“That was previously regulated offshore and they brought that one onshore, issued out of Anchorage Digital Bank,” McCauley said.
Watch the full interview exclusively on Roundtable!
McCauley believes that we will see several more GENIUS compliant stablecoins hit the markets in the near future. These are not coming from just crypto native businesses any longer though. Big banks are getting involved too.
"Western Union decided they want to do a stablecoin. Many different bank consortiums now — I'm aware of at least four — looking to build stablecoins and have those be GENIUS-compliant,” he said.
Year one of GENIUS turned stablecoins from a legal gray area into a bank grade product. The market grew past $300 billion, the podium moved under US oversight, and Wall Street started building its own coins.
