A year after the GENIUS Act was signed, many of its rules are finally taking effect this July. Sami Start, co-founder and CEO of Transak, told TheStreet Roundtable what changes on day one. Th
A year after the GENIUS Act was signed, many of its rules are finally taking effect this July.
Sami Start, co-founder and CEO of Transak, told TheStreet Roundtable what changes on day one.
The GENIUS Act, signed by President Trump in July 2025, is the first US federal framework for paymentstablecoins. It defines who can issue them, how reserves are held, and compliance frameworks for said issuers.
Start believes that the regulatory clarity on this issue has turned stablecoins from a fun side-project into a board-level mandate. And the winners could just as easily be small, AI-powered startups as much as the legacy giants who are scrambling to integrate this technology into their platforms.
"Bigger fintech companies are genuinely starting to have stablecoin strategies," he said.
Start sees a top-down shift occurring in regards to stablecoins.
"I would assume the way that this passes is that there's some kind of mandate at the board level or the senior leadership level where they're like, okay, we need to have a stablecoin strategy," he explained.
Many of these companies do not want to spend the money or time to build out their own infrastructure though. This is where Transak comes in.
"A lot of these companies, they don't want to build a lot of this infrastructure themselves, like the last-mile movement,” Start said. “How do you handle the risk of this kind of money movement? What licenses do you need?"
Transak provides the payments and onboarding infrastructure for stablecoins and other crypto products, allowing partners to focus on strategy instead of the underlying technology. This saves costs on legal work, software development, and more.
Stablecoins have already surpassed legacy payment systems such as ACH in total volume, and continues to scale rapidly. In June 2026, volume reached $1.79 trillion, a 63% increase over the previous month.
Alongside major, recognizable institutions are small startups and bottom-up experimentation.
"We're also starting to see some kind of grassroots adoption where we're seeing cool use cases that we hadn't even thought of," Start said.
The infrastructure Transak provides allows small teams to build big financial products. As an example, he pointed to Telegram, a messaging platform with more than 1 billion global users. Founder Pavel Durov, in an interview with Lex Friedman, stated that the core engineering team was only 40 people. AI makes this even more accessible.
"There are small AI-powered teams that are starting to leverage our infrastructure to build big global products where there can be money movement in all these different countries," Start said.
The GENIUS Act's real effect isn't any single rule, it's the permission it gives to builders to innovate. Once compliance is legible, stablecoins become a product decision, and the battle shifts to who ships faster: banks and big fintechs with distribution, or AI-lean startups with nothing to unwind.
