US-FL: Stablecoins & Digital Money

Stablecoins & Digital Money

Florida's payment-stablecoin regime entered into force on 1 October 2026 under Fla. Stat. s.658.997, created by ch. 2026-176. The statute states that, "effective October 1, 2026, a trust company may not engage in the activity of a qualified payment stablecoin issuer in this state unless the trust company obtains a certificate of approval or is exempted from such certificate under this section." This establishes a binding licensing gate: a trust company seeking to issue payment stablecoins in Florida must either hold a certificate of approval from the state regulator or fall within a defined statutory exemption before commencing that activity, with no grace period built into the provision's own text.

Alongside the approval gate, Florida Statutes Chapter 658 imposes a prudential backing requirement on any issuer that does hold, or is exempted from holding, that approval: it must "maintain identifiable reserves backing the outstanding payment stablecoins of the qualified payment stablecoin issuer on at least a one-to-one basis." The obligation is continuous rather than a one-time condition of entry — it applies for as long as stablecoins remain outstanding, not only at the point of initial authorisation. Together, the certificate-of-approval requirement and the 1:1 identifiable-reserve rule form the core of the regime: entry control plus ongoing prudential backing, both in force from the same 1 October 2026 date.

The regime also contains a scale-based exit mechanism from state-level oversight. A qualified payment stablecoin issuer must transition to federal oversight within 360 days after its consolidated issuance reaches $10 billion, unless a waiver applies. This is a structural feature of the Florida framework rather than a separate future law: the state has defined its own supervisory role as provisional once an issuer crosses that issuance threshold, with a fixed 360-day clock running from the moment the threshold is reached. No issuer is reported in this cycle's register as having approached that threshold, so the provision currently functions as a known future trigger rather than an active transition.

Because the regime has been in force only since 1 October 2026, there is not yet a multi-cycle supervisory record of how the Office of Financial Regulation evaluates certificate-of-approval applications, what the available exemptions require in practice, or how reserve composition will be examined on an ongoing basis. The statute's own obligations, however, are unambiguous on their face: a trust company issuing payment stablecoins into Florida without approval or an applicable exemption is operating outside the law as of the effective date, and an approved or exempted issuer that cannot demonstrate identifiable 1:1 reserve backing is in breach of a continuing obligation, not a one-off filing requirement.

The most concrete forward marker in this regime is the $10 billion consolidated-issuance trigger for mandatory transition to federal oversight, which carries an expected horizon in the 2027-Q4 range on a multi-year uncertainty band, assuming no waiver is sought or granted. Before any issuer reaches that scale, the operative question is how the Office of Financial Regulation handles its first wave of certificate-of-approval and exemption determinations, since the statute leaves considerable room for supervisory practice to define what "identifiable reserves" and a qualifying exemption look like on the ground. Readers with Florida-licensed or Florida-adjacent stablecoin activity should expect this area to generate further developments as the regulator's early application of the regime becomes visible.

Stablecoins & Digital Money

Florida enacted a state-qualified payment-stablecoin-issuer licensing track this cycle under HB 175 and companion SB 314, reported to have passed both chambers of the Florida Legislature in March 2026. The track is structured to align with the federal GENIUS Act's 'substantially similar' pathway, under which a state regulatory framework can be certified by federal authorities as equivalent to direct federal stablecoin-issuer supervision, giving issuers below the federal threshold a state-level licensing option through the Office of Financial Regulation. This is a first-mover move for a US state and positions Florida-domiciled stablecoin issuance as subject to a defined, state-administered licensing process rather than relying solely on federal GENIUS Act supervision or an absence of state-level framework altogether. Most substantive provisions of the framework are reported to take effect October 1, 2026. As with the kiosk-registration measure, the exact date and confirmation of gubernatorial signature rests this cycle on lower-tier corroborating sources rather than a Tier-1 chapter-law citation, which caps confidence at probable.

The October 1, 2026 effective date for substantive provisions is the near-term marker to track, alongside whether the US Treasury certifies Florida's track as 'substantially similar' under the GENIUS Act, a determination that will materially affect how much practical reliance issuers can place on the state-qualified pathway relative to direct federal supervision.

Stablecoins & Digital Money

CS/CS/HB 175 establishes Florida's payment stablecoin issuer licensing regime, requiring issuers to be licensed as a money services business or hold a trust-company certificate of approval from the Office of Financial Regulation, effective October 1, 2026. The instrument creates the qualified payment stablecoin issuer sub-category directly within Florida's existing Chapter 560 Control of Money Laundering in Money Services Business Act, meaning the stablecoin licensing pathway is structurally an extension of the state's money-transmission code rather than a freestanding digital-money statute.

Governor Ron DeSantis signed CS/CS/HB 175 into law alongside other financial-services-related bills, a signing event reported publicly as covering multiple bills with direct impact on Florida's financial services sector. This licensing regime applies to both bank and non-bank issuance pathways, since the trust-company certificate of approval option sits alongside the MSB-licence option, giving stablecoin issuers a choice of regulatory vehicle depending on their corporate structure.

The principal item to watch is whether OFR publishes implementing rules or licensing-application guidance for the qualified payment stablecoin issuer category ahead of the October 2026 effective date, and how many issuers pursue the trust-company pathway versus the standard MSB-licence pathway once applications open.