USA Trends and Developments Contributed by: Dario de Martino and Susan Gault-Brown, A&O Shearman
Additional Executive Branch Activity The executive branch has signalled strong support for the industry through a series of orders and acts, including: • hosting a Digital Asset Summit at the White House on 7 March 2025, attended by the leadership of many global digital asset businesses; • the appointment of agency and banking-regulator chairpersons who have publicly favoured clarifying and liberalising digital asset policy; • Executive Order 14178 of 23 January 2025, which created the President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets; • the establishment by executive order, on 6 March 2025, of a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve to be capi- talised with bitcoin already held by the federal government through criminal or civil forfeiture; • the announcement of a parallel US Digital Asset Stockpile for other forfeited digital assets; and • the direction that the Secretaries of the Treasury and Commerce develop budget-neutral strategies for acquiring additional bitcoin. The Working Group delivered its report, setting out a federal roadmap, in the summer of 2025. The Reserve illustrates the gap that can open between executive ambition and execution. More than a year after the order, it has largely remained an exercise in inventorying and securing the bitcoin the government already holds through forfeiture, with officials conclud- ing that any programme of new acquisition – and the Reserve’s permanence – will require congressional action. Bills to codify it, including Senator Lummis’s BITCOIN Act, remain pending. Executive orders can set direction, but legislation supplies durability. The Rapid Rise in Digital Assets-Related Legislative Activity The most significant development of the past year has been Congress’s sustained, and increasingly biparti- san, focus on digital asset legislation. Agency action, however welcome, is inherently less permanent than statute and cannot resolve questions that span multi- ple regulators; the industry has long understood that federal legislation is the more critical objective. Con- gress’s engagement has been driven by the institu-
tional embrace of digital assets, their integration into traditional finance, the sector’s recovery following the collapse of FTX, and intensive lobbying, educational and political-spending efforts by industry participants. Congress’s first priority was stablecoins. The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stable- coins Act – the GENIUS Act – passed the Senate on 17 June 2025 by 68 votes to 30, passed the House on 17 July 2025 by 308 to 122, and was signed into law on 18 July 2025. The choice of stablecoins as the opening subject was sensible: payment stablecoins are a significant but discrete component of the eco- system, and fully reserved, non-yield-bearing instru- ments do not implicate the investor-protection con- cerns at the heart of the securities laws. Consistent with that logic, the Act creates a federal framework for payment stablecoins that allocates oversight to the prudential banking regulators and the Treasury along- side the states, rather than treating these instruments as ordinary securities; it requires backing by high- quality liquid assets such as dollars and short-term Treasuries, and requires monthly public disclosure of reserve composition. The key question it answers is not whether “investors” are protected but whether the issuers minting and redeeming the instruments are safe and sound. Implementation is now under way. The OCC issued a proposed rule in March 2026, and the FDIC and the Treasury followed with their own proposals in April 2026, the Treasury’s setting out the broad-based prin- ciples by which a state regime will be judged “sub- stantially similar” to the federal framework – the gate- way for state-supervised issuers below the statutory threshold. FinCEN and the Office of Foreign Assets Control have also moved to apply anti-money-laun- dering and sanctions obligations to payment stable- coin issuers. The Act takes full effect no later than January 2027. Other discrete measures have moved as well. On 10 April 2025, the President signed into law a resolu- tion nullifying the IRS “DeFi Broker Rule”, which had expanded the definition of “broker” to include non- custodial actors such as wallet providers and required them to report user data – a measure many in the sec-
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