The agency says a market this young should not carry a presumption that affiliate and third-party payments are prohibited yield. It also refused safe harbors for existing rewards programs, small payments, white-label partners and DeFi.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency published its final rule implementing the GENIUS Act on Wednesday, and the provision the banking industry fought hardest over is no longer in it. The proposal would have presumed that certain payments routed through an issuer's affiliates or related third parties were prohibited yield, leaving the issuer to rebut that presumption. The final rule drops the presumption while leaving the statutory ban itself untouched.
The distinction matters because almost nobody gets a payment stablecoin from its issuer. Tokens reach holders through exchanges, wallets and distribution partners, and those intermediaries run the reward programs that pay holders for balances kept on the platform. The GENIUS Act bars an issuer from paying a holder any form of interest or yield solely in connection with holding, using or retaining a stablecoin. It says nothing explicit about a third party doing the paying, which is the gap the presumption was written to close.
The OCC's stated reason for dropping it is the age of the market. “Because payment stablecoins are a nascent market, the OCC does not believe that it is appropriate to impose a rebuttable presumption with respect to the yield prohibition at this time,” the agency wrote, adding that the presumption could have been “both overinclusive and underinclusive” by capturing permissible arrangements while implying that anything outside it was allowed. Forcing arrangements through a rebuttal process, it said, “risks imposing burden without a commensurate benefit.”
What replaces it is case-by-case supervision. The agency says it will monitor arrangements as it reviews issuer applications and supervises approved issuers, act where it finds violations or evasion, and publish guidance about those actions as it goes. It expects that experience to eventually support a rulemaking clarifying the prohibition, which leaves the question the proposal tried to settle with examiners rather than in the rule.
Anyone reading that as a green light for existing rewards programs will find the rest of the document harder going, because the OCC turned down every exclusion it was asked for. It “declines to presume that rewards programs that predated the GENIUS Act comply with the GENIUS Act,” it wrote, and congressional awareness of them “does not necessarily imply that Congress endorsed them as permissible.” Congress “could have provided a safe harbor for such programs but did not do so,” so they will be judged the same way as new ones.
There is no de minimis exemption for small or incidental payments, because the statute does not contemplate one. There is none for payments made for services, though the agency notes that payments for bona fide services generally fall outside a prohibition aimed at paying someone solely for holding a token. There is none for white-label partners, which the OCC says are more likely than most counterparties to be paying on an issuer's behalf, and none for arrangements that are securities. DeFi arrangements get no carve-out either; the agency says the facts of each one may bear on whether it was built to evade the prohibition. The rule also declines to give a cure period, or a list of examples of what passes and what does not.
The agency kept the tool it would need to act on any of this. Section 4(h)(1) of the Act directs the stablecoin regulators to write rules preventing evasion of section 4, and the yield prohibition is one of its requirements. Eliminating the presumption, the OCC wrote, does not change that it “retains its authority to address evasion.” On the labeling question that runs through the comment file it was blunt: interest does not stop being interest because it is called something else, and reading the prohibition by labels rather than economic substance would make it meaningless.
Where the rule does draw a line is around the word solely. Payments made by an agent on an issuer's behalf are inside the prohibition, because the agent is acting for the issuer. Payments through an intermediary that are not made solely in connection with holding, using or retaining the token are outside it by the statute's own terms, and the OCC accepts that a payment might be made at least partly for other reasons. The one definition the rule adds sits at the other end of the chain: a payment stablecoin holder is the beneficial owner of a token, which excludes parties such as custodians that merely control one for someone else.
The American Bankers Association, which had asked the OCC to strengthen the proposed language rather than remove it, said the outcome preserves the arrangements it complained about. “The result is a final rule that will preserve the status quo for crypto platforms despite Congress's clear intent to protect local lending,” president and chief executive Rob Nichols said, arguing that issuers can deliver economically equivalent yield while technically staying inside the prohibition. Those gaps, he said, “risk undermining the distinction Congress drew between payment stablecoins and traditional bank deposits.” Neither the rule nor the statement establishes at what scale balances would move out of banks, though Circle's own disclosures show how much of an issuer's revenue already goes to the partners holding the customer relationship.
This is the first final rule any of the GENIUS Act's regulators has issued, months after five federal agencies missed the Act's rulemaking deadline. It drew roughly 328 comments before the period closed on May 1. Bank Secrecy Act, anti-money-laundering and sanctions requirements are not in it and will come in a separate rulemaking coordinated with the Treasury Department, whose own GENIUS Act proposal drew a request from the Blockchain Association to keep DeFi out of its scope. The OCC will announce separately when it starts accepting issuer applications and waiver requests.
The rule and the GENIUS Act both take effect on January 18, 2027, under docket OCC-2025-0372. The agency says it will adjust the regime as the market develops, but on yield the adjusting is explicitly deferred: unless legislation changes the statute, the OCC says it must implement the prohibition as enacted.
