Senate Banking advanced the GENIUS stablecoin bill in an 18–6 vote

The U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs voted 18–6 on March 13, 2025 to advance the GENIUS Act, moving a proposed federal framework for payment stablecoins toward consideration by the full Senate.

All committee Republicans and five Democrats supported the measure, according to contemporaneous reporting. The bipartisan result was significant because Congress had debated stablecoin legislation for several years without enacting a comprehensive federal regime. Committee approval did not make the proposal law, guarantee a floor vote or settle how the Senate might amend it.

Stablecoins occupied an important position in digital-asset markets on March 13. Dollar-linked tokens served as trading collateral, settlement instruments and a bridge between bank money and public blockchains. Rules governing who could issue them, what could back them and how they would be redeemed therefore had implications beyond any single token company.

A federal and state licensing structure

The committee-approved text would generally restrict issuance of dollar-denominated payment stablecoins in the United States to permitted issuers operating under federal or qualifying state supervision. Its structure covered subsidiaries of insured depository institutions as well as approved nonbank entities.

State-qualified issuers could remain within a state framework while outstanding issuance stayed at or below $10 billion, provided that the state regime met the bill’s similarity requirements. An issuer exceeding that threshold would generally have to transition toward federal oversight within the specified period or stop issuing new tokens, although the text allowed a federal regulator to grant a waiver.

That division was institutionally important. It attempted to preserve a role for state financial regulators while creating federal supervision for larger issuers whose products could circulate nationally or internationally. The bill remained proposed legislation, however; no company received a license or regulatory approval from the March 13 vote.

Reserves, redemption and disclosure

The markup text required permitted issuers to maintain reserves of at least one dollar for every outstanding payment stablecoin. Eligible assets included U.S. currency, qualifying bank deposits, short-dated Treasury securities and specified repurchase agreements and money-market funds.

Issuers would have to disclose their redemption policies, establish procedures for timely redemption and publish the amount and composition of reserves monthly. A registered public accounting firm would examine the prior month-end reserve information, while the chief executive and chief financial officer would certify the report’s accuracy. The text also generally prohibited issuers from pledging or reusing reserve assets outside specified liquidity and custody exceptions.

These provisions addressed the central risk in a fiat-referenced stablecoin: the possibility that holders cannot redeem at the promised value when demand rises or reserve assets become unavailable. A statutory reserve rule could set minimum operating standards, but it could not by itself eliminate custody, liquidity, operational, fraud or run risk.

Compliance remained the fault line

The bill would treat permitted stablecoin issuers as financial institutions under the Bank Secrecy Act and subject them to federal sanctions, anti-money-laundering, customer-identification, recordkeeping and suspicious-activity obligations. It also required the technological capacity to comply with lawful orders affecting specified assets or accounts.

Those provisions did not end the committee’s dispute over illicit finance. Senator Chris Van Hollen, who voted against the bill, said on March 13 that additional safeguards were needed and objected to the rejection of his amendment requiring members of Congress to disclose digital-asset interests under the STOCK Act. Other committee Democrats raised concerns about sanctions enforcement, foreign issuers and possible movement of funds away from bank deposits.

A package of six amendments was adopted during the markup. Contemporaneous reporting said the changes included character-and-fitness reviews for issuer principals, restrictions on deceptive names, priority for customer claims against stablecoin reserves in insolvency and tighter language around eligible government-issued reserve assets.

The verified development on March 13 was therefore procedural but consequential: a divided committee produced an 18-vote coalition for a detailed stablecoin framework. The unresolved questions—foreign-issuer treatment, enforcement reach, financial stability and conflicts of interest—remained matters for any subsequent Senate debate rather than settled policy on the event date.