COMMENTARY: How the GENIUS Act Is a Quiet Revolution in Crypto Toby Norfolk-Thompson September 9, 2025 Competitive Strategies, Digital Currency, E-Commerce, Issuing/Originating, Law and Regulation, Mobile Commerce, Mobile Wallets, Person-to-Person Payments, Point-of-sale, Real-time Payments, Transaction Processing For years, critics and evangelists alike have obsessed over crypto’s headlines, its volatility, its philosophy, its personalities. But the GENIUS Act, recently passed in the United States, points to a new phase: a regulated, institutionalized, quietly ubiquitous crypto economy, one that doesn’t shout from the rooftops but works silently in the background, like the payments infrastructure it’s destined to become. The GENIUS Act is being rightly hailed as a win for the digital-asset sector. It doesn’t just legitimize stablecoins, it standardizes them. It provides clear, detailed requirements across a dozen key areas: segregation of reserves, anti-money laundering oversight, and reporting. And, crucially, it provides an unambiguous definition that stablecoins are not securities. Norfolk-Thompson: The “GENIUS Act points to “a regulated, institutionalized, quietly ubiquitous crypto economy.” This clarity matters a great deal—not just to crypto firms, but to traditional financial institutions looking for a regulated entry point into the space. For the first time, major banks, asset managers, and even corporates like Amazon, are actively exploring stablecoin issuance. A threshold above $10 billion triggers enhanced federal oversight, a strong signal that this is a market expected to grow rapidly and safely. And, with its clear ban on a U.S. central bank digital currency (CBDC), the Act doubles down on a private-sector-first approach. That’s a rare moment of regulatory precision and political alignment. But not everyone is celebrating. Mark Hays, associate director at Americans for Financial Reform, argues that the Act is “just one of many actions that the crypto industry and its allies in the White House and Capitol Hill are taking to launch an uncontrolled experiment in unleashing crypto on the economy and the financial system.” He even compared the Act to the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which laid the groundwork for the 2008 financial crisis by weakening oversight on derivatives. It’s a dramatic claim—and a lazy one. Unlike the toxic leverage that led to 2008, this regime insists on one-to-one backing by U.S. Treasuries. It removes risk from the system, it doesn’t add it, and I speak as someone who was on the front line during the global financial crisis, in structured trading at Barclays. Of course, challenges remain. As we tokenize more real-world assets, from private equity to warehouse inventory, and remove friction from global settlements, we do open the door to new forms of leverage. But that’s a regulatory challenge to manage, not a reason to stand still. The upside is profound. As Christian Catalini of MIT’s Sloan School of Management notes, the Act lays the groundwork for “faster, lower-cost, global payments,” systems where interoperable wallets allow seamless movement between payment methods, currencies and platforms. That world is already emerging, and in lots of ways it’s already here. I recently paid for a cab in Singapore using PYUSD. It felt entirely ordinary and unremarkable, and that’s the point. One of the most trackable and traceable transactions on earth was invisible at the point of use. In the 1990s, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association pushed to make London the global center of derivatives and options, quietly transforming the financial system through digitization. Crypto is now following the same path, from noisy disruptor to invisible infrastructure. In three years, tapping a card to buy a coffee with Everything-From-A2Z Coin won’t feel like crypto. My cab ride in Singapore won’t feel like crypto. Buying something in IKEA, Ralph Lauren, Wayfair, or H&M, or any of the other countless stores that already accept cryptocurrencies at select outlets, won’t feel like crypto. But they all will be. And no one will need to know what layer it’s built on. That’s the real genius of the GENIUS Act. It’s helping crypto disappear into everything. —Toby Norfolk-Thompson is a co-founder and chief commercial officer at Sentora, a decentralized-finance analytics and risk management platform. Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn
