Washington wants the rest of the world running on digital dollars. Now it's reportedly willing to go into business to make that happen.
The Donald Trump administration is considering an initiative to promote dollar-backed stablecoins overseas, according to a Bloomberg report Wednesday, citing people familiar with the plans.
Stablecoins are crypto tokens built to hold a steady 1:1 value with a currency, typically by keeping the equivalent amount in cash and short-term government debt in reserve.
The idea is to reinforce the dollar's status as the world's reserve asset by creating joint ventures between the U.S. government and private-sector firms. The people familiar with the plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the goal is twofold: keep foreign users hooked on dollars, and generate fresh buyers for U.S. Treasuries.
Multiple federal agencies could get pulled in. Bloomberg named the Treasury Department, the State Department, and the U.S. International Development Finance Corp., the government's arm for co-investing with private companies on projects that serve American foreign policy goals.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. The GENIUS Act , the federal stablecoin law Trump signed last year, already forces issuers to back every token with reserves like cash and short-dated Treasuries. That link is the whole mechanism: more stablecoins circulating abroad means more issuers parking money in U.S. government debt.
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If you send money home from abroad, buy something online priced in dollars, or live somewhere your local currency loses value fast, stablecoins become a great tool for financial stability. Washington effectively becoming a business partner in that pipeline means U.S. foreign policy and dollar strategy get baked directly into the plumbing regular people already use for remittances and payments.
It's also a race. China has floated its own digital yuan, the European Central Bank is pushing ahead on a digital euro, and the BRICS countries are also interested in exploring the possibility.
But unlike Trump’s idea, these bigger competitors don’t want private businesses involved in their monetary policies. China has banned stablecoins officially and ECB President Christine Lagarde has separately pushed back on euro-denominated stablecoins as a competing strategy, calling them an inefficient way to boost the euro's global reach.