Treasury Proposes New Rules for Stablecoin Issuers and DASPs

The US Treasury Department has proposed new rules for stablecoin issuers and digital asset service providers (DASPs), creating a distinction between those who create stablecoins and those who merely move them around.

According to the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) under the GENIUS Act, an issuer is defined as any entity that bears the redemption-at-par obligation and holds out stable value to the public. This includes Circle, which has received final OCC trust bank approval and operates as the First National Digital Currency Bank.

However, other entities like Ripple, BitGo, Fidelity, and Paxos remain in limbo with pending pre-opening conditions, having received their conditional approvals back in December 2025. This creates a narrow window where the first-mover advantage is not just a marketing slogan, but a structural reality of the compliance timeline.

The DASP model, on the other hand, is scaling through distribution rather than issuance, with the recent Coinbase-Stablecore partnership illustrating this shift. The network now encompasses over 4,000 distribution points, positioning DASPs as essential plumbing for traditional finance, even if they do not hold the underlying redemption obligation themselves.