On July 17, Eastern Time, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the "National Innovation Act to Guidance and Establishment of U.S. Stablecoins" (referred to as the "Genius Act" or "Stablecoin Act") with a vote of 308 in favor and 122 against, aiming to carry out major legislative reforms to cryptocurrency regulation.
According to CCTV News, a month ago, the U.S. Senate passed the aforementioned "Genius Act" with a rare overwhelming majority. This was also the first time that the Senate passed crypto-asset legislation. After passing the House of Representatives, the bill will be submitted to President Trump, who will sign it into law.
The bill clearly requires stablecoin issuers to hold U.S. dollar asset reserves at a ratio of 1:1, and the purpose of issuance is payment or settlement, rather than securities or commodities. It also restricts technology giants from issuing stablecoins and mandates federal or state-level license management.
The analysis pointed out that this marks that the entire cryptocurrency market will enter a more standardized but more competitive stage, and will also have a profound impact on the digital asset landscape and financial markets in the United States and even the world, including further helping to strengthen the status of the U.S. dollar while further weakening the sovereign currency credit of some countries, which may face greater trade challenges.
The biggest feature of traditional cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin is that their prices fluctuate violently. Stablecoins, as a cryptocurrency anchored to stable assets (such as legal currency and gold), exist to solve this problem and require cryptocurrency to use 100% of legal currency as a reserve value.
Entering 2025, stablecoins will usher in a major breakthrough. The current global scale has exceeded US$250 billion, exceeding the combined transactions of VISA and MasterCard for the first time. U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent recently predicted that this scale may reach 2 trillion U.S. dollars in the future, which will significantly increase the demand for the U.S. dollar and U.S. debt, thereby directly strengthening the U.S. dollar monetary system.
In addition to the United States, since 2018, the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, the European Union, Hong Kong, Cayman Islands, Panama and other countries/regions have successively issued or announced regulatory bills to promote stablecoins and cryptocurrencies. Among them, the European Union, the United States, and Hong Kong, China, all have statutory reserve ratios for banks close to 0%, but stablecoin issuers require a reserve ratio of 100%.
In addition, the U.S. House of Representatives also passed a broader cryptocurrency market structure bill, the Clarity Act, on July 17, which will be submitted to the Senate for consideration.
The Clarity Act aims to clarify the division of responsibilities between the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the regulation of digital assets. The bill covers all digital assets associated with blockchain systems, including mainstream cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and Ripple, and divides these digital assets into two categories: securities assets (still regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission) and commodity assets (regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission).
