The charter picks the arithmetic

The line going round this week is that three federal regulators have each given banks a path to issue a stablecoin. The documents exist. They do not describe three routes to one destination: they describe three agencies answering one statutory instruction with different arithmetic, in a framework where the charter a bank already holds decides how much capital it must put behind an identical business.

Start with the calendar, which the coverage flattens. The Comptroller of the Currency proposed first: 102 pages published on 2 March 2026 at 91 FR 10202, Docket ID OCC-2025-0372, comments closed 1 May. The FDIC followed on 10 April with 46 pages at 91 FR 18534, a new part 350 plus amendments to the capital and deposit insurance rules, comments closed 9 June. The credit union regulator, which nobody counts, put out 80 pages on 18 May. The Federal Reserve's two notices arrived on Thursday and have not reached the Federal Register at all.

Every one carries the line ACTION: Notice of proposed rulemaking. A Federal Register search for final rules mentioning stablecoins since July 2025 returns four documents, and not one implements this statute. Six months after the OCC's comment window shut, and four after the FDIC's, neither has issued anything final. Three regulators have not given banks a path; they have described paths they have not built. Meanwhile the GENIUS Act takes effect on the earlier of 18 months after enactment — 18 January 2027, which is 114 days away — or 120 days after final regulations. It will switch itself on with no implementing rules behind it.

The divergence is not cosmetic. Section 4(a)(4)(A)(iii) tells each regulator to write reserve diversification and deposit concentration standards, tailored to business model and risk profile, that do not exceed what is sufficient to ensure ongoing operations. One sentence, three answers. The FDIC's is a single line of rule text: an issuer "shall on each business day limit its exposure to any one eligible financial institution, regardless of instrument type, to no more than 40 percent of its reserve assets." Mandatory, flat, no alternative.

The OCC puts two options in the same paragraph and says only one will survive. Option A is a principle with a safe harbour: at least 10 per cent of reserves each business day in demand deposits or balances at a Reserve Bank, at least 30 per cent recoverable within five business days, no more than 40 per cent at any one eligible financial institution, and a weighted average maturity of no more than 20 days. Option B makes those numbers compulsory. The Federal Reserve, arriving six months later, proposes no numbers at all — reserves must be "sufficiently diverse" and "predominantly" Treasuries — and asks whether it should have imposed caps.

That 20-day ceiling is the one provision reaching into balance sheets already in existence. This desk opened the two largest issuers' reserve sheets on Thursday: a weighted average maturity of ten days at one, roughly $38bn of gold, bitcoin and secured lending at the other. Ten days clears the safe harbour. The second sheet clears no version of any of these documents.

Capital is where the split becomes hard to defend. The Board wrote a formula: two per cent against uninsured deposit claims and undercollateralised reverse repo, a graduated operational-risk charge, a quarter of three-year average non-reserve revenue, a $5m floor for new issuers. The Comptroller wrote none. Its proposal states that the agency "is not currently proposing any floors on the minimum capital requirement", and sets each issuer's requirement case by case from the projections in its own application, topped by an operational backstop sized on the last twelve months of actual expenses. The FDIC's part 350 does the same, and asks whether standardised requirements would be preferable. Two agencies have decided this is a supervisory judgement; the third has decided it is a number.

Then there is who may knock. The Fed's application rule reaches subsidiaries of state member banks; the FDIC's, proposed in December 2025 and extended to 18 May, subsidiaries of state nonmember banks and savings associations. The OCC's reaches subsidiaries of national banks and federal savings associations — and also federal qualified nonbank issuers and foreign issuers registering under section 18(c). It is the only federal door a non-bank can walk through.

All three want a confidential weekly return, the OCC's the most demanding by a distance — down to CUSIPs, repo counterparties and the hundred largest holders of each coin. The FDIC asks whether it should coordinate examinations with the other regulators when an issuer sits in a consortium spanning more than one. Nobody has arranged that yet. One answer only the FDIC could give, and it gave it. Deposits held as reserves backing a stablecoin would be insured to the issuer as corporate deposits, aggregated with its other corporate deposits at the same bank — and expressly "not insured to payment stablecoin holders on a pass-through basis". A fully backed coin whose backing sits in a bank account carries $250,000 of federal insurance, whatever the number on the token.

Treasury's own two rules and the anti-money-laundering pieces are proposals as well. So the reading for a bank drafting an application is narrow. The reserve list is the same everywhere, because the statute wrote it. The concentration limit is 40 per cent at the FDIC, 40 per cent at the OCC if Option A survives, and unwritten at the Fed. The capital number is a formula in one building and a conversation in the other two. What all of it shares is that none of it is law, with 114 days to go.