The era following the implementation of the GENIUS and CLARITY Acts is poised to dramatically reshape the global financial landscape, although this shift has not been widely discussed. The GENIUS Act, which came into force in July 2025, sets stringent federal guidelines for stablecoins backed by the U.S. dollar, requiring full reserves in cash or short-term Treasuries. Meanwhile, the CLARITY Act is set to introduce extensive reforms to the digital asset market structure. Together, these laws have transformed stablecoins from experimental financial tools into essential components of financial infrastructure.

The most significant yet often overlooked change is how stablecoins are becoming the backbone of settlement in the U.S. capital markets, which are valued at around $500 trillion. This transformation impacts the roles of both the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department. Tokenization is revolutionizing equities, bonds, and derivatives by enabling instant settlement, round-the-clock trading, fractional ownership, and reduced costs.

Projections suggest that digital securities will rise from billions today to between $10–16 trillion or more by 2030, driven by institutional adoption and clearer regulations. Efficient settlement of these digital securities will require substantial liquid digital dollar equivalents for on-chain transactions, potentially replacing the current money market funds, which hold nearly $8 trillion in assets as of late December 2025, according to the Investment Company Institute, with a significant portion invested in short-term Treasuries.

As tokenization scales to a multi-trillion-dollar market, the demand for stablecoins will skyrocket. Currently, the stablecoin market is valued at around $310 billion, led by USDT and USDC, and it will need to grow to support atomic, cash-settled trades free of traditional frictions.

This burgeoning demand will coincide with a shift in Federal Reserve leadership, as Jerome Powell steps down, and a more dovish Fed takes shape under President Trump’s administration, which favors lower interest rates and growth-oriented policies. Stablecoin issuers, already among the top purchasers of Treasury bills, holding hundreds of billions in short-term securities, will be well-positioned to become primary buyers. This shift is likely to exert downward pressure on interest rates, aligning with new Fed policies and reducing yields, thus lowering the costs associated with increased U.S. borrowing.

End The Fed?

The unprecedented demand for short-term U.S. debt to back stablecoins may force new legislative challenges related to rapidly repeated debt-ceiling hikes or raise congressional justification to empower the U.S. Treasury to issue its own money. 

This raises more controversial questions: How will dollar issuance shift from the Federal Reserve to the Treasury? What effect will the elimination of U.S. debt service have on the U.S. economy? Ending the Fed’s money monopoly could challenge independence, policy transmission, and global financial order.

Bitcoin Banks

A big question is what role Bitcoin will play. As banks migrate on chain, Bitcoin could continue its current path and finally act as part of the basket of reserves that back stablecoins, as foretold by Hal Finney on this day in 2010. Hal Finney, a cryptographer and legendary cypherpunk, was one of Bitcoin’s earliest and most important contributors. He downloaded the software immediately after its 2009 launch and received the first transaction of 10 BTC from Satoshi Nakamoto. Hal lost his battle with ALS in 2014. 

As Hal’s prediction comes to pass, Bitcoin may finally become a lockstep hedge against monetary debasement due to the increase in debt issuance.  

Banks got it all in the end

The very system that Bitcoin protested against on January 3, 2009 has led to The Great Compromise of today as U.S. banks fork their way to becoming the new old darlings of Wall Street. 

AI and blockchain adoption will drive explosive margin expansion for the ten largest U.S. banks. The brutal math of efficiency is clear: AI + blockchain eliminates over $50 billion in annual legacy back-office costs, shifting from labor-intensive to code-intensive operations. These aren’t traditional banks anymore; they are hyper-efficient productivity state machines. 

The biggest winners in rewired finance won’t be tool-builders alone—they’ll be incumbent banks and agile startup special purpose broker-dealers that replace legacy costs with blockchain based securities market infrastructure. As tokenization accelerates, these institutions may lead the next market cycle as utilities for origination and trading as well as core portfolio investments. 

“If stablecoins become buyers of first resort for U.S. Treasuries, broker-dealers are positioned to serve as the primary distribution channel for digitally native investment products, such as tokenized money market funds. That model naturally extends beyond Treasuries to other on-chain securities, enabling trillions of dollars in digital assets to flow through the existing brokerage system rather than sit outside it”; Stated Aaron Kaplan, Founder and Co-CEO of Prometheum Inc., a special purpose broker-dealer.

In the post-GENIUS-CLARITY economy, stablecoins become a settlement rail, drive Treasury demand, and catalyze monetary rethinking. The questions—about Fed independence, Bitcoin’s future, dollar hegemony, and banking’s transformation—are urgent and profound, and may also explain the true nature and motive of the last administration’s Operation Chokepoint 2.0.