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Stablecoins: Washington’s discreet asset
Regulation, innovation, sovereignty: dollar-backed digital assets are emerging as a new instrument of US monetary power.
Over the past few months, a series of high-profile events in the United States has captured the public’s attention: the Epstein case, Supreme Court rulings on tariffs, and geopolitical tensions surrounding Venezuela and Iran. Yet, far from the spotlight, the Trump administration has embarked on a monetary and financial manoeuvre of a completely different nature: more discreet, but potentially transformative. Its testing ground: stablecoins.
A silent monetary offensive
Adopted in July 2025, the Genius Act marks the first attempt by the federal government to regulate these dollar-backed digital assets. Objectives are clear: strengthen the US financial leadership, protect users, combat illicit use and, above all, consolidate the position of the dollar as world reserve currency.
"This is not just about regulating a new financial tool, but rather about redefining the contours of the dollar’s dominance in the digital age."
Behind this regulatory framework lie three major ambitions. First, to legitimise the major private issuers of dollar-backed stablecoins, whilst repatriating an activity that is largely offshore. Secondly, to foster the emergence of an ecosystem of private but strictly regulated “digital dollars”. Finally, and this is undoubtedly the most strategic point, to create structural demand for US debt, as stablecoins are backed by high-quality liquid assets, notably Treasury bills.
Such a project seemed set to trigger an immediate ‘big bang’. Nothing of the sort happened. Its implementation met with strong resistance. Large banks, in particular, saw these new players as potential competitors capable of offering quasi-banking services without being subject to the same regulatory constraints. They therefore lobbied to tighten licensing requirements, restrict direct access to the Federal Reserve and strictly regulate the composition of reserves. Without blocking the reform, this pressure helped slow down its rollout. At the same time, major players in the sector, such as Coinbase, have been locked in a standoff with Congress over the issue of stablecoin remuneration; a key issue that remains, to this day, unresolved.
Beyond technical debates, stakes are strategic. If successful, this initiative could transform the global monetary infrastructure by combining private innovation with monetary sovereignty. In other words, it is not merely a matter of regulating a new financial instrument, but rather of redefining the contours of the dollar’s dominance in the digital age.
New global monetary rift
Beyond Washington, other institutions are concerned by this trend. The European Central Bank fears that widespread use of dollar-pegged stablecoins within the eurozone could erode monetary sovereignty, disrupt the transmission of monetary policy and further reinforce the dominance of the US dollar. It has responded by adopting the European regulation on crypto-assets (MiCA), an ambitious framework combining governance requirements, issuance caps and reserve constraints, in order to curb the rise of dollar-pegged stablecoins within the European Union.
In China, these same instruments are seen as a direct threat to capital controls and the Party’s financial repression model: they would facilitate capital outflows and, once again, boost the dollar’s appeal at the expense of the renminbi. Authorities are therefore favouring strictly regulated experiments within a tightly controlled domestic environment.
Is the reign of the greenback coming to an end?
For several years now, a question has been on the minds of economists and historians: is the decline of the dollar as the dominant reserve currency inevitable? The rise of the Global South and the growing fragmentation of the geopolitical order have fuelled this hypothesis. Some, such as the Scottish historian Niall Ferguson, also point out that the fiscal and financial trajectory of the United States, when viewed alongside its military expenditure, bears resemblance to that of empires at the end of their cycle, where political decline and monetary weakening tend to converge.
Without succumbing to the idea of an imminent decline of the dollar, the US offensive on stablecoins can be interpreted as a preventive strategy. It could offer the United States additional leverage to consolidate its monetary hegemony in the digital age. Conversely, China is following an almost orthogonal trajectory, favouring a more or less explicit pegging of its currency to gold. It lacks neither the ambition nor the assets to make the yuan a credible competitor to the dollar.
One thing is certain: currency has now emerged as a major strategic battleground between the United States and China.
April 08, 2026
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