Federal regulators in the United States have finally shown their hand on one of the biggest unanswered questions around stablecoin policy, and the answer is less draconian than many in crypto likely expected. The newly released proposal from the Federal Reserve and others would require stablecoin issuers to run bank-style identity checks on their direct customers, but it also makes clear that ordinary users can keep sending stablecoins around on secondary markets in a peer-to-peer manner without the issuer having to collect any personal information about them. The proposal is currently at the “request for comment” stage and not a final rule. It comes from a joint group of federal regulators, including the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and the National Credit Union Administration. The agencies say the proposal is meant to implement the GENIUS Act’s requirement that permitted payment stablecoin issuers be treated as financial institutions for Bank Secrecy Act purposes and maintain an effective customer identification program. In plain English, the U.S. federal government is moving toward formal anti-money laundering (AML) and identity-checking rules for stablecoin issuers. But it is not, at least in the proposal’s current form, trying to force issuers to identify every person who ever touches a stablecoin token. That is a meaningful clarification of how the GENIUS Act may be implemented, and it suggests the agencies are trying to fit stablecoins into a bank regulatory framework without breaking the basic way these assets already circulate and function.