Following the US Treasury Department and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) proposal rules for the GENIUS Act—the country’s first stablecoin bill—Bitcoin (BTC) custodian BitGo has submitted its formal comments to the OCC.
BitGo Pushes OCC On GENIUS Act ChangesThe company argued that several parts of the OCC’s proposed rules would benefit from adjustments, listing five areas in which it believes the draft approach needs refinement.
First, BitGo said the rules should recognize that banks already operate a structure for co-branded financial products under a single legal entity.
Second, BitGo said the interest prohibition in the GENIUS Act needs clearer safe harbors. While the law is designed to prevent stablecoins from paying interest, BitGo argued that the OCC’s current proposed rules could unintentionally sweep in arrangements that are not really about yield.
Stablecoin Oversight ConcernsThird, the Bitcoin custodian pushed back on the proposed reserve concentration limit, arguing that the rule should not require reserves to be placed in “riskier” banking institutions.
BitGo warned that exempting Fed accounts and G-SIBs from the cap entirely would better align with risk reduction, contending that forcing major issuers to shift reserves into smaller regional banks would increase risk rather than lower it.
Fourth, the company said the proposed automatic redemption freeze mechanism in the GENIUS Act framework could actually trigger the kind of market stress it is meant to prevent.
Under the OCC’s proposal, if an issuer receives redemption requests that exceed 10% of outstanding issuance within 24 hours, the issuer would face an automatic seven-day freeze, even if it already has sufficient liquidity to meet redemption demand within the normal timeframe.
BitGo argued that, for a fully liquid issuer capable of satisfying redemption requests on schedule, the freeze would be unnecessary and could manufacture panic in situations where the issuer could have handled redemptions without disruption.
The OCC’s GENIUS Act proposal includes weekly reporting on the top 100 holders and traders, and BitGo argued that permissionless networks use pseudonymous wallet addresses by design.
BitGo said compliance would likely force issuers to provide speculative, probabilistic estimates, which could mislead regulators and expose companies to liability for errors outside their control. In the company’s view, the requirement should be limited to KYC-onboarded customers only.
Featured image from OpenArt, chart from TradingView.com
