A year after the GENIUS Act, the US is experiencing a stablecoin gold rush. Western Union announced it’s own stablecoin. Paypal did too. Transaction volume on stablecoins is greater than Visa
A year after the GENIUS Act, the US is experiencing a stablecoin gold rush. Western Union announced it’s own stablecoin. Paypal did too. Transaction volume on stablecoins is greater than Visa and Mastercard combined and ACH.
Canada’s stablecoin market is a bit different. There are only 2 issuers of stablecoins in the nation: Circle, with USDC, and Stablecorp with QCAD. Stablecorp founder Kesem Frank sat down with TheStreet Roundtable to discuss why Canada has yet to embrace stablecoins the same way Americans have.
QCAD became Canada’s first compliant CAD stablecoin in November 2025, and has navigated one of the most stringent regulatory regimes in the world along the way.
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Canada, so far, has not seen an equivalent of the GENIUS Act enacted. Instead, they have been retrofitted into existing securities frameworks which were not designed for them.
"We do not have the draft enacted into law the way the GENIUS is. What we do have, and have had for the past three, four years, is a framework that was put together by the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA). That is today the only framework that allows an issuer like myself to actually distribute their token throughout our entire federation," he explained.
Canada's Stablecoin Act was introduced in Bill C-15 on November 4, 2025 and received Royal Assent (equivalent to the President’s signature in the US) on March 26, 2026. This Act is not yet operational though, and banks are still waiting supporting regulations.
This has kept the list of compliant stablecoins short.
"There are only two companies that are compliant with that framework. One of them is Circle with USDC. The other one is QCAD, the token that my company issues," Frank said.
Frank is no longer worried about regulatory hostility in the short or long term.
"We have been there from being completely ignored, to being ridiculed, to being feared, and finally — and I'm saying this thankfully — graduating to the mainstream," he said.
Frank's position is a regulatory arbitrage in reverse. He absorbed years of securities-law compliance costs before purpose-built rules existed, and the payoff arrives if the Stablecoin Act's regime grandfathers the incumbents who showed up early.
Two licensed issuers in a G7 economy is either an indictment of Canadian caution or a moat for the two firms that cleared it. It’s likely both.
