Glossary

The Vocabulary, Term by Term

Statute and standards terms as this reference uses them. Each entry has a stable anchor, so the legislative map and the standards page can point at a definition instead of restating it. Definitions are descriptive summaries; the instruments linked from the map control.

Payment stablecoin: Under the GENIUS Act, a digital asset issued for payment or settlement and redeemable at a predetermined fixed amount of monetary value. The statutory definition is what pulls an issuer into the federal framework; tokens outside it are governed by other law.
Reserve: The assets an issuer holds against outstanding stablecoins. Statutes typically require at least one-to-one backing in enumerated asset classes, held segregated from the issuer's own assets and, in the U.S. framework, bankruptcy-remote and unencumbered.
Attestation: An engagement in which an independent practitioner reports on subject matter that is someone else's responsibility — here, an issuer's assertion about its reserves. Attestation is a family of engagement types with different assurance levels; the word alone does not say which one was performed.
Examination (AT-C 205): The highest-assurance attestation engagement under AICPA standards. The practitioner obtains reasonable assurance and expresses an opinion on whether the subject matter (or an assertion about it) is fairly stated against the criteria. The GENIUS Act's monthly requirement is examination-level.
Review (AT-C 210): A limited-assurance attestation engagement. The practitioner performs procedures sufficient to conclude that nothing came to their attention indicating material misstatement — a negative-form conclusion, weaker than an examination opinion.
Agreed-upon procedures (AT-C 215): An engagement in which the practitioner performs specific procedures the engaging party agreed to and reports the factual findings. No opinion and no conclusion are expressed; the reader evaluates the findings themselves. The international analogue is ISRS 4400.
Reasonable assurance: The high (but not absolute) level of assurance behind an examination opinion or audit opinion. Contrast with limited assurance, the level behind a review conclusion.
Suitable criteria: The benchmarks the subject matter is measured against in an attestation engagement. Criteria must be objective, measurable, complete, and relevant. Who authored the criteria matters: standards-body criteria and management-defined criteria are both permitted under the standards, but they give a reader different things.
AICPA 2025 Criteria for Stablecoin Reporting: The AICPA's published criteria for asset-backed, fiat-pegged tokens. Part I covers presentation and disclosure of outstanding tokens and reserve assets; Part II (added in early 2026) covers controls supporting token operations. Designed to serve as suitable criteria for examination engagements.
PCAOB registration: Registration with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, historically tied to auditing public companies and broker-dealers. The GENIUS Act requires the monthly reserve examination to be performed by a PCAOB-registered public accounting firm — a firm-level status, distinct from which standards govern the engagement.
ISAE 3000 (Revised): The IAASB's standard for assurance engagements other than audits or reviews of historical financial information. It distinguishes reasonable-assurance from limited-assurance engagements. A report under this family ends in a conclusion; a findings-only report is an ISRS 4400 engagement instead.
ISRS 4400: The international standard for agreed-upon procedures engagements: factual findings, no opinion. The presence or absence of an opinion paragraph — not the report's title — is what tells a reader which family a report belongs to.
Federal-qualified issuer: A nonbank permitted payment stablecoin issuer supervised by the OCC under the GENIUS Act, one of the statute's three licensing paths alongside insured-depository subsidiaries and state-qualified issuers.
State-qualified issuer: An issuer below $10 billion outstanding operating under a state regime that Treasury's certification process has found substantially similar to the federal framework. Crossing $10 billion triggers notice to the OCC and a transition to federal oversight, a waiver, or a halt on new issuance.
Stablecoin Certification Review Committee: The Treasury-chaired committee that certifies, and recertifies, whether a state's regulatory regime is substantially similar to the federal framework — the gate that keeps the state-qualified pathway open for a state's issuers.
E-money token (EMT): MiCA's category for a token referencing a single fiat currency. EMT issuance requires an e-money institution or credit institution license. 'Significant' EMTs face higher reserve-composition and concentration requirements and usage caps for non-EU currencies.
Asset-referenced token (ART): MiCA's category for a token referencing a basket of assets rather than a single fiat currency, with its own standalone authorization track.
Statutory trust (backing assets): The UK consultation's proposed structure: backing assets held on trust for holders, custodied outside the issuer's group, so holder claims survive issuer insolvency. The functional cousin of the U.S. framework's bankruptcy-remote requirement.
Redemption at par: The holder's right to exchange the token for its face value in the reference currency. Frameworks differ on the window (on demand, two days, five days) and on whether fees are permitted; the right itself is the load-bearing promise a reserve exists to keep.
Rehypothecation: Reusing reserve assets — pledging, lending, or otherwise encumbering them. Prohibited for U.S. permitted issuers outside narrow carve-outs, because a reused reserve is not fully there when redemptions arrive.
NPRM / ANPRM / final rule / effective: The rulemaking lifecycle. An advance notice (ANPRM) asks questions; a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) proposes text and opens a comment period; a final rule adopts text with a stated effective date. A proposal binds no one — a distinction the map's stage column exists to keep visible.
Federal Register / docket: The daily journal of U.S. federal rulemaking; each document has a citation and a docket where comments are filed. A Federal Register document number (for example, FR Doc. 2026-04089) is a stable way to cite a specific proposal.
Customer identification program (CIP): The Bank Secrecy Act requirement to verify customer identity. A joint proposal by FinCEN and the banking agencies would apply a tailored CIP requirement to permitted payment stablecoin issuers.
Bank Secrecy Act (BSA): The U.S. AML statute. The GENIUS Act treats permitted issuers as BSA financial institutions, which pulls in AML/CFT program, sanctions screening, and suspicious activity reporting obligations, with the operational detail set by Treasury and banking-agency rules.