There are new developments regarding the Genius Act, considered the second most important law regulating the cryptocurrency market in the US.
The U.S. Treasury Department has released a draft regulation containing key rules for enforcing the GENIUS Act, which regulates the stablecoin market. The proposed framework aims to clarify the conditions under which companies wishing to issue stablecoins in the U.S. will be required to obtain federal or state licenses, and the terms under which stablecoins issued abroad can be offered to U.S. users.
The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) published by the Treasury Department outlines the details of implementing Section 3 of the GENIUS Act and will collect public comments on the regulation for 60 days.
According to the draft regulation, as of January 18, 2027, the expected effective date of the GENIUS Act, individuals or entities without a suitable federal or state license will generally be unable to issue stablecoins for payment purposes in the United States.
The Treasury Department aims to more clearly define the scope of “issuing payment stablecoins in the U.S.” in the regulation. This is intended to reduce uncertainty in the industry regarding when stablecoin companies are required to obtain licenses under the GENIUS Act.
The regulation also sets conditions for stablecoins issued by companies outside the US. Accordingly, digital asset service providers may offer stablecoins on the US market provided the foreign stablecoin issuer is technically capable of executing lawful orders from US authorities and complies with reciprocal regulations between the US and the issuer’s country.
The second important date under the GENIUS Act will be July 18, 2028.
From this date, digital asset service providers will generally be permitted to offer or sell only payment stablecoins issued by licensed issuers to users in the U.S.
The regulation proposed by the Treasury also aims to clarify the responsibilities of cryptocurrency exchanges, custodians, and other digital asset service providers by defining the concept of “offering or selling” a stablecoin to a person in the United States.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated that the GENIUS Act creates a comprehensive legal framework for payment stablecoins, and that the Treasury wants to implement regulations quickly. Bessent said that regulatory clarity aims to encourage companies to innovate in the U.S., as well as strengthen the dollar’s position as a global reserve currency.
The new draft regulation is a continuation of the preliminary regulatory work that the Treasury Department published last September regarding the implementation of the GENIUS Act, and for which it requested feedback from industry representatives. The Department expects stablecoin companies, financial institutions, and other stakeholders to submit their views on the new proposal within a 60-day consultation period.
What is an AppNet? An AppNet is a distributed, collaborative “network of applications” installed on multiple ServiceNow instances that uses the Hedera Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to exchange signed, verifiable, and ordered state changes. These changes of the ServiceNow records propagate across all environments as messages of the Hedera Consensus Service (HCS). A ServiceNow AppNet can scale to any size, involving just a few organizations as well as 10s, 100s, or 1,000s. Each ServiceNow instance:
● Connects to Hedera through the DLT nodes, which Hedera Council members operate.
● Receives the information from the network through the Hedera Mirror nodes.
Each ServiceNow instance can be part of multiple AppNets supporting different business networks and value streams. An AppNet creates a distributed, shared data model and a multi-party business process that is cryptographically verifiable and subject to consensus between the interacting parties.
No alt text provided for this image The e-Procurement use case ServiceNow recently released the Procurement Service Management (PSM) application, that streamline the buying experience within the organization, digitizing processes that allows employee to self-serve and organization to optimize costs, align teams and boost productivity. The e-Procurement use case described here can augment PSM capabilities to an entiere network of organizations. In a traditional procurement system, the buyer establishes a one-to-one connection with every supplier. For that reason, these processes are still very manual, resistant to standardization, and still managed through “analogic” tools like email and phone calls. In the e-Procurement set up at the opposite, suppliers in the supply chain of one or more customers constitute a network where the buyer can submit his requests for goods and services. The suppliers can bid for a specific request and the customer select the most appropriate bid offered by vendors. This network must be trustless because it contains competing entities that need to work together through a multi-party business process. Hence the benefit of using the Hedera Hashgraph DLT to guarantee certified, signed, and timestamped interactions without the need for a trusted third party.
No alt text provided for this image As we’re keeping the demonstration intentionally conceptual, we recommend the book “A practical guide to e-auctions for procurement: How to maximize impact with e-sourcing and e-negotiation” recently published by J. G. Larsen (Kogan Page, 2021), to dig deeper into the concepts of e-Procurement, e-Auction and e-Negotiation.
The business value represented by the hyper-automation of the e-Procurement networks through ServiceNow and Hedera is significant across multiple industries:
In Public Sector, public tenders are a sweet spot for optimization and transparency Manufacturing implements e-Procurement to manage high-throughput business networks and streamline supply chains. Telecoms are at the forefront of building distributed marketplaces for collaborative bidding between multiple operators and service providers bidding for different network segments. Financial institutions, like banks, are involved in trade finance and can be authorized to inspect their customers’ supply chain to evaluate the suitability for specific financial instruments. ESG Auditors need to inspect supply chains for carbon emission, rate the sustainability of their auditees, and access certified data to prevent “greenwashing.” How do AppNets work? AppNets require a set of capabilities that build one over the others. Hedera DLT constitutes the bottom layer (A) and is operated by Council members. On top of the distributed network, Hedera provides the Hedera Consensus Service (HCS) that exposes the asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (aBFT) consensus algorithm through an easily accessible API (B). The upper three components of the stack live within the ServiceNow ecosystem. The first layer (C) is the “Hnow” connector, made of technical services running on the MID server and an identical scoped app within each ServiceNow instance. Hnow provides to any application running on the instance the connectivity into the Hedera nodes and mirror network. On top of the Hnow connector, customers and partners can create an arbitrary number of AppNets (D). Each AppNet is a network of scoped, identical applications that defines a shared and encrypted data model and multi-party workflows between business entities. Finally, each AppNet connects (if required) to “local” business processes, represented either by ServiceNow native workflows (IT, Employee, and Customer) or any other business application developed with the Creator Workflow and the App Engine Studio (E). On the left of figure 3, you can also see how the stack is typically referred to in blockchain/DLT terms: layer 1 (on-chain), layer 2 (interconnection layer), and layer 3 (off-chain).
No alt text provided for this image How is the e-Procurement use case implemented? The participants to the e-Procurement business network are the customer, who represents the buying party, the suppliers, who are the bidding parties, and any third party, like an ESG auditor. The participants interact through a shared and verified data model made by two related tables for asks and bids, which are the basis for the e-Procurement multi-parties exchange. The buyer and the vendors can submit changes of state (transactions) while the auditor has access to the network in read-only mode.
No alt text provided for this image The flow of the PoC is the following:
The customer requests products or services to its supply chain by placing asks to the network. The supply chain’s vendors bid for the customer’s request. The customer accepts one or more of the bids, depending on the rules of the network (just one in the case of the PoC). The auditor, or any other organization which is authorized to inspect the supply chain, derives scores and KPIs about the participants to be used within other processes, like ESG or trade finance. No alt text provided for this image After being submitted to the Hedera network, each ask or bid will be active on the distributed data model and shared across participants. In contrast, each record will become “tokenized” and practically immutable by any individual actor when reaching the final, notarized state.
Key Takeaways & Futures The AppNet concept is highly general and applies to every situation where a shared business model and multi-party workflow are required. This PoC shows how to create a decentralized market for e-Procurement leveraging ServiceNow low-code capabilities (Layer 2 & 3) and the Hedera DLT (Layer 1).
The AppNet architecture effectively creates a multi-company value stream that can scale to any business network’s size. Distributed data and processes are coupled seamlessly to local data and processes on each instance, creating a fully connected ecosystem. We’re working to extend the AppNet architecture to a broader set of use cases and deepen the application of the e-Procurement POC to specific industries and business domains.
Geneva / Schwyz, Switzerland, August 5th 2026 | Taurus, a leading digital asset infrastructure provider for banks and regulated financial institutions, now supports the full Hedera technology stack. Institutions can use every capability of the Hedera network – from the custody of digital assets to the issuance of tokenized products – through a single provider.
Taurus, whose technology is used in production by more than 40 banks and regulated financial institutions worldwide, including Deutsche Bank, CACEIS and State Street, has built out Hedera support in three phases over 18 months, in strategic partnership with The Hashgraph Association.
With the final phase, smart contract capability, now delivered, an institution can custody and stake HBAR, Hedera's native currency, as well as issuing tokens or running programmable products such as tokenized bonds, funds and stablecoins, all within the same platform and under the same due-diligence and risk framework.
Infrastructure chosen for a bank's custody needs today often cannot support its tokenization plans tomorrow, forcing a fresh vendor search, a new risk assessment and another integration project just as a digital asset strategy gathers pace. Full Hedera coverage inside Taurus removes that risk: expanding into new digital asset products becomes a configuration decision rather than a procurement exercise. Institutions are not asked to commit to advanced use cases upfront; the infrastructure is already in place for whenever their strategy matures.
The integration spans all three Taurus platforms - Taurus-PROTECT, Taurus-EXPLORER and Taurus-CAPITAL - and covers custody, staking, node infrastructure, native token issuance through the Hedera Token Service, and smart contract deployment through Hedera's EVM-compatible Smart Contract Service, which lets institutions and their technology partners build using Solidity and other standard Ethereum developer tools.
The smart contract addition also opens Hedera to the companies that build products for banks: tokenization engines, stablecoin issuers and fund administrators can now run on Hedera under Taurus custody without any additional infrastructure of their own.
The Hashgraph Association, the Swiss non-profit that drives global adoption of the Hedera network, supported the build-out throughout its funding, training and ecosystem development programs. The two organisations announced their partnership in 2025, and Taurus joined the Association's Global Membership Program earlier this year.
Kamal Youssefi, President of The Hashgraph Association, which partnered with Taurus on the integration, said,
"With the MICA regulatory framework taking effect in Europe, alongside the progress in the USA with the Clarity Act, institutional investors and highly regulated financial institutions can now enter the Web3 space with ease and confidence, thanks to the full integration of the Hedera technology stack into Taurus’s crypto infrastructure solutions.”
He adds,
“Utilizing one of the best governed enterprise grade public networks, and leveraging Taurus’s full range of industry leading capabilities, this partnership represents another major milestone in the institutional adoption of the Hedera network.”
Lamine Brahimi, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Taurus, also commented that,
"Financial institutions need infrastructure that can cover more than one digital asset use case. They want a single platform for the full spectrum of their strategy. By supporting the complete Hedera technology stack, Taurus enables institutions to leverage native tokenization, smart contracts, and custody capabilities within the same regulated infrastructure they already trust."
Micha Roon, Head of Engineering at The Hashgraph Group, added that,
"This single-platform approach entirely removes the technical friction of vendor sprawl, empowering engineering teams to seamlessly scale from simple custody to programmable tokenization on Hedera without ever initiating another integration project."
Hedera is a public distributed ledger network whose nodes are operated by a governing council of global organisations, including Google, IBM, Deutsche Telekom, Standard Bank and, since this year, Accenture and FedEx. The network has processed more than 70 billion transactions to date. With stablecoin rules maturing across major markets, institutional tokenization is moving from pilots to procurement - and how much of a network a provider supports has become part of how banks score their options.
The Hashgraph Association and Taurus announced their strategic partnership in 2025, which was followed this year with the joining of Taurus into The Hashgraph Association Membership program, another step into active engagement within the Hedera ecosystem.
About Taurus Founded in 2018, Taurus is a Switzerland-based financial technology group providing enterprise-grade digital asset infrastructure and financial services. With offices around the world, Taurus helps banks and regulated financial institutions issue, store and trade digital assets, including cryptocurrencies, tokenized assets and stablecoins. For more information, visit www.taurushq.com.
As tokenization moves from pilots to production, the conversation is changing.
Institutions are asking fewer questions about throughput…
…and more about accountability.
Who governs the network?
Who makes decisions?
Who is responsible when markets come under pressure?
Rubin, Hedera’s Chief Policy Officer, argues that governance isn’t an afterthought.
It’s what allows tokenized markets to become interoperable, transparent and inclusive.
Technology creates possibilities.
Governance creates confidence.
Recent events like the Silicon Valley Bank collapse and the temporary USDC depeg showed how closely traditional finance and digital assets have become connected.
When confidence is tested…
Governance matters.
That’s also why organizations like the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) increasingly focus on governance alongside innovation.
Digital infrastructure isn’t just about moving assets faster.
It’s about ensuring systems remain trusted under stress.
Rubin describes governance as a multiplier.
Not because it replaces blockchain…
But because it enables blockchain to operate within real-world legal, regulatory and institutional frameworks.
Without governance…
Technology struggles to scale.
The principle is already emerging in practice.
Wyoming’s Stable Token Act created the legal foundation for the FRNT stablecoin.
A reminder that successful digital infrastructure starts with governance, long before the first transaction is processed.
Rubin doesn’t stop at theory.
She points to real-world implementations:
• Hedera Guardian for transparent carbon markets.
• Blockchain for Energy for verifiable reporting.
• EQTY Lab for AI governance.
Different industries.
The same governance principles.
That’s perhaps the most interesting part of the article.
The examples aren’t connected by technology alone.
They’re connected by trust.
Each demonstrates how governance helps make information verifiable, auditable and accountable.
Seen through that lens…
The article isn’t just about tokenization.
It’s about a broader shift.
From building faster digital systems…
…to building trusted digital systems.
Perhaps that’s why governance is the multiplier.
Because technology can digitize assets.
But only governance enables institutions to trust, adopt and scale them.
And looking at the examples Rubin highlights, it’s hard not to notice that this philosophy has quietly shaped Hedera’s approach from the very beginning.