The Comptroller Says the Stablecoin Rule Will Be Final by November. Half His New Charter Requests Involve Digital Assets.

The Comptroller of the Currency put a deadline on his agency's stablecoin rulemaking this week. Speaking at the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium in Jackson Hole on August 19, Jonathan V. Gould said the OCC will finalize its rule implementing the GENIUS Act by November.

We will have a final rule out by November, so we are working with great speed here.

He also disclosed a figure that describes what is arriving at the agency's door. Since the start of the administration — about 18 months — the OCC has received 40 applications for new bank charters, and, in his words, over half of those bank charters involve some form of digital asset activity.

What the proposed rule covers

The OCC issued its notice of proposed rulemaking on February 25, 2026. It addresses three groups: permitted payment stablecoin issuers, foreign payment stablecoin issuers falling under OCC jurisdiction, and certain custody activities conducted by OCC-supervised entities. The comment period ran 60 days from Federal Register publication.

One category was deliberately left out. Bank Secrecy Act, anti-money-laundering and sanctions provisions were excluded from that proposal and are being addressed separately, in coordination with the Treasury Department. Anyone reading the November rule as the complete compliance picture for a stablecoin issuer would be reading it wrong.

The OCC has given thoughtful consideration to a proposed regulatory framework in which the stablecoin industry can flourish in a safe and sound manner.

Why a bank regulator has this job at all

Gould made the historical argument himself. He described stablecoin reserve oversight as returning the OCC to its original mission in the 1860s, when the agency was created to ensure that the reserve assets backing notes issued by national banks were of adequate quality.

The comparison is apt in one specific way. A payment stablecoin, like a nineteenth-century national bank note, is a private liability that circulates at par because holders believe it is redeemable. Whether it holds par depends entirely on what sits behind it. Supervising the quality of that backing is a narrower question than supervising a bank, and it is the question the OCC was built to answer.

The charter numbers

• 40 new bank charter applications received over roughly 18 months.
• More than half involve some form of digital asset activity.
• Gould described this as an eightfold increase compared with the four years of the prior administration.
• No charter decisions were announced alongside those figures.
• Gould observed that it is becoming ordinary course for payment stablecoins to appear in applicants' business plans.

An application is not an approval, and a charter application count is a measure of intent, not of capacity granted. But it is the cleanest available indicator of how many firms now believe a national bank charter is the right container for a digital asset business — and the answer, on the OCC's own count, is more than twenty.

What to watch

Whether the final rule appears by November and how far it moves from the February proposal, particularly on reserve composition and custody. Separately, whether the OCC begins granting charters to digital-asset applicants before or after the rule is final — the sequencing would say something about how much the agency thinks the rule needs to settle first.