You know Washington’s finally noticed something when it stops trying to ban it and starts drafting laws about it. This week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the GENIUS Act, a name so heavy-handed it might as well be stamped on a jar of protein powder. Alongside it came the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act, whose title has the subtlety of a Ron Paul campaign bumper sticker, and the Clarity Act, which promises to make the regulatory fog around crypto way less thick. But for all the semantic bluster, these three bills, especially the GENIUS Act, signal the moment the U.S. government finally stopped pretending crypto was a fever dream and started preparing to live with it.
The GENIUS Act, passed 308-122 with rare bipartisan enthusiasm, provides the first serious federal framework for stablecoins (crypto tokens pegged to the U.S. dollar and backed by liquid assets like Treasuries or fiat reserves). Until now, stablecoin issuers operated in a regulatory Bermuda Triangle, supervised by a patchwork of state regulators and federal agencies whose views on digital assets ranged from outright sceptical to semi-coherent. With this bill, the fog begins to lift. Issuers will be federally licensed, reserves will be public, and crucially, both banks and non-banks will be allowed to compete on equal footing, so long as they stick to the rules.
That alone marks a philosophical shift. The bill doesn’t merely regulate stablecoins—it legitimizes them as a structural extension of the U.S. monetary system. These are not rogue tokens or techno-utopian gimmicks anymore. They are private-sector instantiations of the dollar. This is Congress conceding, perhaps reluctantly, that the future of money may well lie in the hands of compliant entrepreneurs and not just federal treasurers.
This is, of course, what Friedrich von Hayek argued in 1974 in his seminal work The Denationalisation of Money. The Nobel Prize laureate proposed that the monopoly of money issuance by the state was neither necessary nor desirable. In its place, he imagined a system of competing private currencies, each backed by reliable reserves and judged by the public on stability, transparency, and trust. Monetary discipline, in his view, would come not from the wisdom of central bankers but from the harsh judgment of the marketplace. The currencies people preferred would be the ones that held their value. Inflationary ones would wither from lack of use. Half a century later, that thought experiment has become legislative doctrine.
Stablecoins are not just compatible with Hayek’s vision: they’re its modern, networked, high-speed realization. What Hayek envisioned in theory, the GENIUS Act enacts in policy: allow competing issuers, set minimum standards, and let the best money win. In doing so, the U.S. is not abdicating monetary sovereignty. It’s reinforcing it, by making the dollar the most programmable, portable, and privately distributed currency on earth.
That framework helps make sense of the second bill passed this week: the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act. The House majority has decided, with some urgency, that the U.S. government should not be in the business of issuing a Central Bank Digital Currency, particularly not one capable of tracking, conditioning, or reversing individual transactions. The bill forbids the FED from creating a digital dollar for direct or indirect use by the general public.
This is not a fringe concern. The specter of a programmable government-issued currency is no longer theoretical. China’s e-CNY is already being used to reward or restrict behavior. The ECB has floated similar ideas under the usual euphemisms: “digital identity,” “enhanced oversight,” “transaction control.” The American response, at least under the current congressional majority, is a clear “nay.” If the dollar is to be digitized, it will be done by the market, not the state. That distinction is not just philosophical. It is civilizational.
Some call this a missed opportunity. In reality, it’s a strategic line in the sand. A CBDC is not just a new payment method, but a restructuring of the relationship between citizen and state. Even if benignly designed, the potential for abuse is embedded in the architecture. A centrally issued, government-run, fully traceable digital currency may be technically elegant but politically radioactive. Better to block it now than to discover too late that your wallet comes with a kill switch.
The third bill, the Clarity Act is less dramatic but arguably more necessary. It resolves a long-standing turf war between the SEC and the CFTC, two agencies that have spent the last half-decade treating digital assets like a contested divorce settlement. The Clarity Act gives the CFTC clearer authority over digital commodities and puts limits on the SEC’s ad hoc campaign to sue first and explain later. If passed in the Senate, it would let projects and companies plan without needing a psychic to decipher which regulator’s mood will dominate that quarter.
Why now? Because the market has matured while the politics have caught up. The speculative noise of 2021 has receded, but the infrastructure has solidified. Stablecoins are no longer fringe, they are used in trade, settlement, and increasingly, global remittance. Circle and PayPal are building, JPMorgan is integrating, and emerging markets are adopting. Congress is simply updating the legal scaffolding to match what fintech has already built.
Predictably, critics argue that banning a Fed-issued CBDC will leave the U.S. behind as Europe, China, and others march ahead. This is not just wrong; it’s categorical error. America never led by issuing the shiniest form of government money. It led by creating institutions that were open, trusted, and adaptable. Private dollar-backed stablecoins, compliant and well-capitalized, are not a threat to that legacy. They are its extension into software.
Crypto’s most consequential legislative moment didn’t arrive on a blockchain or via grassroots revolt. It came through roll-call votes, fiscal notes, and committee markup. And yet, the result is a quiet monetary revolution. A regulated space for competitive digital dollars. A firewall against central bank overreach. A long-overdue truce between regulators. And in the background, academia smiles: Hayek’s visionary proposal is now public policy.
Money, it turns out, doesn’t need to be nationalized to be trustworthy. It needs to be earned. And that, at long last, is what the U.S. has legislated.
Bepi Pezzulli is a Solicitor of the Senior Courts of England and Wales specializing in Governance as well as a Councillor of the Great British PAC. He tweets at @bepipezzulli.
Image from Grok.