United States congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said that the GENIUS stablecoin bill creates a “backdoor” for the government to effectively create a central bank digital currency, veiled as privately issued crypto tokens.
The lawmaker said that regulated stablecoins feature “functional surveillance capabilities,” which make them indistinguishable from CBDCs. In a separate social media post, she added:
“This bill regulates stablecoins and provides for the backdoor central bank digital currency. The Federal Reserve has been planning a CBDC for years, and this will open the door to move you to a cashless society and into digital currency that can be weaponized against you by an authoritarian government controlling your ability to buy and sell.”
Rep. Greene’s comments echo a growing tide of individuals in the Bitcoin and crypto communities sounding the alarm on regulated stablecoins and the potential for these privately-issued tokens to become captured by the state.
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The Bitcoin and crypto communities voice the same concerns
“The Genius Act forces stablecoins into CBDC compliance and control; functionally identical to a CBDC, without the scary name,” Bitcoin advocate Justin Bechler wrote in a July 19 X post.
Saifedean Ammous, author of “The Bitcoin Standard,” argued that the US dollar, in any form, is essentially a central bank digital currency that is already monitored by the state and increasingly digital.
“Governments realize that if they control stablecoins, they control financial transactions,” Jean Rausis, co-founder of the Smardex decentralized trading platform, said.
The executive added that the ability to freeze or rollback transactions and surveil centrally-managed stablecoins makes them indistinguishable from a CBDC.
The GENIUS bill was amended in March to include stricter anti-money-laundering provisions, sanctions compliance, and know-your-customer requirements, necessitating financial surveillance and the ability to censor transactions.
In October 2024, Curve Finance founder Dr. Michael Egorov told Cointelegraph that centralized stablecoins carry the risk of regulatory capture, including government seizure of the underlying fiat assets held in bank accounts or custodial institutions backing the digital tokens.
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