Congress handed stablecoin issuers a requirement in July 2025: hold one dollar of qualifying reserves for every dollar in circulation. The stablecoin market today is $315 billion. In the eleven months since the law was signed, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, BNY, JPMorgan, Fidelity, and State Street all went to market with essentially the same product.
What Happened
On June 8, State Street launched SSCXX, a money market fund built to qualify as a reserve asset under the GENIUS Act. The fund holds only short-term U.S. Treasuries with maturities of 93 days or less, overnight repurchase agreements collateralized by those Treasuries, and cash. It opened with $121 million in assets and a 3.51% yield. State Street is the latest firm in, not the first. BlackRock launched a Circle-affiliated reserve vehicle earlier this year. Goldman Sachs and BNY built their own GENIUS Act-aligned products before the spring. JPMorgan filed for JLTXX, a tokenized version running on Ethereum, on May 12. Fidelity filed its version the same quarter.
What the Mandate Made
The products are nearly identical in legal structure: short paper, overnight repo, instantly redeemable. What separates them from a standard money market fund is the buyer they are designed for. Stablecoin issuers run 24/7. They need reserves they can redeem any hour, in seconds. A traditional money market fund settles T+1. For a stablecoin operating around the clock, that is a twenty-four-hour settlement gap built into the product. The tokenized versions JPMorgan and BlackRock are building on Ethereum are designed to close that gap. Atomic settlement, available any time. That is the reason the race is happening, and why it is happening fast.
I've been watching T-bills and overnight repo for forty-nine years. The first money market fund launched in 1971. The industry took decades to become a fixture of institutional cash management. The GENIUS Act was signed on July 18, 2025. Six firms had a product in market within eleven months. That pace does not happen from organic institutional enthusiasm. It happens when a law creates a defined, mandatory demand floor and every major asset manager can see the same $315 billion number.
Worth noting: these are not blockchain projects pitched at conferences. BlackRock's version is a digital share class tied to a $6.1 billion fund that has operated since 2024. JPMorgan's JLTXX is a new fund on Ethereum with a $1 million minimum, built specifically for institutions that need GENIUS Act-compliant reserves and want to hold them on chain. State Street's SSCXX launched with $121 million on day one. These are live, operating products with institutional custody and regulatory filings, built for buyers who already exist and have a legal mandate to show up.
Tether, which holds $187 billion of the stablecoin market on its own, is a different case. The GENIUS Act does not apply to offshore issuers, and Tether currently keeps its reserves in traditional Treasury instruments and gold, not tokenized products. But the dynamic is worth watching. As USDC and other domestic stablecoins grow and shift reserves into on-chain products, the spread between an offshore issuer with traditional reserves and a domestic issuer with transparently auditable on-chain reserves starts to show up in the market.
What I'm Watching
Whether State Street SSCXX reaches $1 billion in AUM before year-end. At $121 million on launch day, the room to run is there. That crossing point is the first meaningful signal that the reserve product category is real at institutional scale, not just a filing.
What USDC does with its reserve allocation. Circle and BlackRock already have an existing relationship on the treasury reserve side. If Circle starts shifting a material portion of its $75 billion in reserves into on-chain GENIUS Act-compliant funds, it becomes the largest single buyer in this category almost overnight.
Whether Tether responds. The GENIUS Act does not reach Tether directly. But if domestic, compliance-grade stablecoins take market share on the back of more transparent, on-chain reserves, the competitive pressure lands on Tether whether the law applies to them or not.
What the July DTC pilot does to this market. DTC-tokenized Treasuries and GENIUS Act-compliant tokenized money market funds are currently separate products. At some point, an institution will want to hold tokenized Treasuries as collateral at DTC and use a tokenized money market fund as the underlying vehicle. That connection does not exist yet. The firms building both sides will build it next.
Bottom Line
Money market funds are the most straightforward financial instrument ever invented. One dollar in, one dollar back, plus a bit of yield. The Reserve Primary Fund launched in 1971. For the next three decades it quietly became one of the defining instruments of institutional cash management. The GENIUS Act handed the tokenized equivalent a $315 billion captive market and a legal mandate. Six firms got there in eleven months. I don't know which product wins the race. I know eleven months is fast, and the firms moving fastest are the ones who have been winning in every previous compression cycle I've watched.
All the best,
— Tony