Logan Payne Discusses the GENIUS Act with Cointelegraph

Winston & Strawn lawyer Logan Payne spoke with Cointelegraph to discuss the GENIUS Act, a stablecoin regulation bill now headed to President Trump. The bill, which originated in the Senate and was passed by the House, will dictate how issuers of the tokens must be regulated to serve the U.S. market.

Logan told Cointelegraph that the act creates an incentive for stablecoin issuers to seek a banking license, stating that a new stablecoin license under the GENIUS Act limits a company’s activities to “purely stablecoin issuance,” but most stablecoin issuers do more than that.

“Pretty much every stablecoin issuer in the United States issuing under U.S. Law right now engages in activities outside the scope of that license,” he said.  

He noted that even if an issuer gets a GENIUS Act-approved license, they’d still need state-level money transmission licenses to operate nationally, creating an incentive for stablecoin issuers to apply for a national trust bank charter with the office of the Comptroller of the Currency, “which allows for them to engage in stablecoin issuance plus a wider range of activities, but without having to get state-to-state licenses.”

The bill also includes a section that bans stablecoin issuers from giving holders and users interest or yield offerings, which are one of the biggest market devices for stablecoins to pull in users. Some offer yield natively for holders while others reward those holding the stablecoin on exchanges. “I would be unsurprised to see a lot of those arrangements change or be modified moving forward,” Logan said.

He said that the Genius Act could inject uncertainty into decentralized finance over how platforms are to handle stablecoins.

“How GENIUS will impact DeFi is intentionally a bit unaddressed, for now at least,” he said. “There’s still going to be a lot of uncertainty, but in a general policy environment, if it continues, we’ll start to have some of the answers being given over time.”

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Logan's insights were featured in an additional Cointelegraph article. Read the full article.