U.S. crypto policy shifted from enforcement-driven litigation to statutory frameworks, joint agency playbooks, and supervisory alignment. Congress enacted the GENIUS Act to create a nationwide stablecoin regime that classifies permitted payment stablecoins as a distinct class, places primary federal oversight in an OCC-centered framework, assigns roles to the FDIC, Federal Reserve, Treasury, and state regulators, separates payment stablecoins from securities, commodities, and deposits for compliance, requires reserve and attestation practices, restricts nonfinancial public companies from issuing payment stablecoins without a banking license or narrow approval, and sets implementation timelines that are shaping issuer and banking partner program design. Lawmakers introduced the CLARITY Act to allocate spot market authority between the SEC and the CFTC, grant the CFTC exclusive jurisdiction over digital commodity spot markets while the SEC retains authority over digital securities and related intermediaries, and create an SEC gate to evaluate network decentralization that can place an asset under CFTC oversight. The SEC closed enforcement cases, including the action against Coinbase, established a Crypto Task Force focused on interpretations, targeted no-action relief, and an innovation exemption for controlled sandbox pilots, and initiated staff work on a consolidated registration approach for platforms that combine brokerage, ATS, custody, and advisory functions to create a single supervisory perimeter. The SEC and CFTC launched a harmonization track to coordinate surveillance and exemptions and to develop consistent rules on order handling, market data, conflicts, termination and liquidation mechanics for centralized and decentralized venues while addressing oracle reliability, code disclosure, validator conflicts, and measurable decentralization metrics. The Federal Reserve, OCC, and FDIC rescinded prior blanket cautions, issued activity-based examination expectations tied to governance, controls, and resolvability, and permitted supervised institutions to support custody, stablecoin reserve services, and tokenized deposit rails that align with documented risk-management standards. Market participants are aligning reserve management, attestation cadence, wallet controls, registration and surveillance models, and infrastructure spending to conform with the new statutory and supervisory frameworks, and execution and compliance readiness are determining which firms can scale as litigation risk declines as a headline driver. Near-term priorities for 2026 include SEC issuance of a tokenized securities framework, interagency rulemakings to implement GENIUS Act requirements and operational standards for permitted payment stablecoins, and a Congressional market structure bill to unify registration and conduct standards across brokers, dealers, exchanges, and custodians handling digital assets and to harmonize custody segregation, market access, clearing and margin models, and disclosure norms for on-chain distributions and protocol upgrades. Advisory actions being taken by firms include choosing registration paths early based on token classification and activities, designing stablecoin programs to meet OCC supervision expectations including reserve governance and attestation schedules, mapping products to CLARITY channels and preparing for dual compliance where activities cross commodity and securities lines, engaging regulators through comment letters, no-action requests, and sandbox pilots with clear metrics, and aligning vendor contracts and operational design to GENIUS implementation timelines and interagency exam priorities. 

Source: https://web3businessnews.com/policy/coordinated-us-crypto-regulation/

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