You’re wrong about the GENIUS Act

Opinion by: Zachary Kelman

No, the GENIUS Act doesn’t remove all government control over money. It doesn’t make Bitcoin tax-free. It doesn’t “legalize” decentralized finance (DeFi). And no — it’s not a Trojan horse for a Mark-of-the-Beast-style CBDC, especially with the anti-CBDC provisions passed alongside it.

What the GENIUS Act does — and what we should cheer — is break the stranglehold that a handful of powerful banks and regulators have maintained over global dollar clearing for decades. It ends their monopoly on who gets access to clean dollars — and makes their quiet mandate to monitor how that money is used, and whether it aligns with political agendas in Washington or on Wall Street, far more difficult — perhaps even out of reach.

The is the first real crack in a system drifting for years toward financial authoritarianism. Riding the wave of stablecoin-driven dollarization, it knocks the US financial apparatus off course from a surveillance-based regime. It steers it — imperfectly, but meaningfully — toward broader monetary freedom and global access to the still-stable reserve currency.

Though the torch-and-pitchfork crowd will accept nothing less than a crypto panacea, understanding this landmark legislation requires looking to crypto and banking history rather than recent social media outrage.

The crypto dream

When I left traditional finance for crypto over a decade ago, I had a “Crypto Dream” and a “Crypto Nightmare.” The dream was that Bitcoin specifically, and crypto more broadly, would become a better form of money for people, especially those who lacked access to it — a kind of public utility that fueled growth and improved lives.

For that to happen, Bitcoin had to remain decentralized and untainted. That meant regulators keeping their grubby hands off it — and banks and institutionalists barred from co-opting it to preserve the status quo.

If the dream came true, every person could trade what they want, with whomever they want, using money that held real value — free from those who would debase it, surveil it or decide how better they should use it.

The crypto nightmare

The corollary, the , was that Bitcoin and public blockchains would be repurposed to end money laundering — and in the process, end financial freedom. It’s the vision that BlackRock CEO Larry Fink — then a Bitcoin critic, now the face of iBIT — outlined in 2017: “A true global digital currency” where “you would have everything understood, everything would be flowing through,” making money laundering impossible by design.

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That might sound paranoid to some, but it’s not abstract. US financial policy has evolved — from the Bank Secrecy Act of 1973 to the USA PATRIOT Act — into a sprawling surveillance regime that deputized banks to monitor, record and police their clients’ behavior.

It hit a fever pitch during the Obama era, when the DOJ launched Operation Chokepoint, pressuring banks to sever ties with legally operating but politically disfavored businesses — from payday lenders and pawn shops to porn sites and coin dealers.

Crypto lobbying

Since Pirate Wires already the targeting of crypto under Chokepoint 2.0 so meticulously — or, as Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong put it, when “Warren and Gensler tried to unlawfully kill our entire industry” — there’s no need to rehash how crypto fell under the crosshairs in this next chapter.

Fortunately, that chapter was shorter than expected. Crypto lobbying intensified. Judges ruled against then-SEC Chair Gary Gensler, leading to the approval of a Bitcoin ETF. And most crucially, USD-denominated stablecoins soared just as the dollar’s global reserve status faced its most serious threats in modern history — and, for the first time, the American financial imperial project flinched. Warren, Gensler and the institutionalists blinked. Cooler heads prevailed.

China and the BRICS bloc pushed for de-dollarization. Still, stablecoins disrupted their strategy — forcing China and Russia to retreat from crypto and focus on building state-backed alternatives to compete with USDT and USDC. Treasury yields spiked from COVID-era spending and ballooning debt, yet crypto kept growing, spreading dollars through stablecoins worldwide.

Then came the decisive turn: the US-led sanctions response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. It was an Emperor Has No Clothes moment for US financial power — exposing the limits of dollar weaponization and weakening the case for keeping dollar clearing monopolized by a few US banks and their overseers.

Shifting against financial imperialism

Instead, the GENIUS Act struck a devastating blow against American financial imperialism — shifting power from correspondent banks to stablecoins as tools to plug the interest rate gap and slow de-dollarization. When Senator Elizabeth Warren, for example, pushed an amendment requiring all stablecoin issuers to monitor onchain transactions — a more extreme version of what the PATRIOT Act already demands of the correspondent banking mafia — fellow Democratic Senator Kirstin Gillibrand, visibly irked, warned it would kill the industry before it got off the ground. She made clear her priority wasn’t surveillance — it was strengthening the dollar.

Perhaps this wasn’t a moral awakening in favor of financial freedom, but the reality of imperial limits and a tacit admission that sanctions and chokepoints no longer carry the weight they once did. It certainly wasn’t the fulfillment of the crypto dream, though it may mark the end of the crypto nightmare — unless the political winds shift decisively, and Fink — who now holds the “keys” — shifts course along with them.

For now, what we’ve got is more access to dollars — and more access to crypto.

At least, until the next election.

Opinion by: Zachary Kelman.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.