Congress looks to further deregulate digital currencies

The U.S. Senate appears poised to pass the GENIUS Act, a comprehensive piece of cryptocurrency legislation that could facilitate widespread fraud and economic instability throughout the economy.

The bill is called the "Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins of 2025" or the "GENIUS Act of 2025." The intent is quite simple: to ensure that digital currencies face minimal regulation or oversight. President Trump once referred to cryptocurrency as a scam. However, as crypto interests rained money on his 2024 campaign, the increasingly transactional president quickly changed his tune and got in on the grift.

Just days ahead of his inauguration, Trump issued his own meme coin called $TRUMP. For those unfamiliar with digital currencies, a cryptocurrency is a blockchain-based asset designed for use in transactions. In other words, you can accept payments with cryptocurrencies as an alternative to traditional currencies like the dollar. Bitcoin and Ethereum are two popular examples.

Cryptocurrencies are decentralized, meaning they are not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain them. That aspect also allows for anonymous transactions, which is why they are a common form of currency used by hackers for digital ransoms, terrorist groups, or people purchasing illicit materials such as illegal drugs or child pornography.

Coins are mined using high-powered computer farms that perform complex mathematical puzzles. As per its original design, only 21 million bitcoins can ever be mined. Nearly 20 million have already been mined. The wildly unstable price of Bitcoin has rendered it largely ineffective as a medium of exchange. However, it has become increasingly popular as a store of value or hedge against dollar-based investments.

For example, the first commercial transaction using Bitcoin involved 10,000 Bitcoins for two Papa John's pizzas. Although worth about $40 at the time, those 10,000 coins would have been worth approximately $881,312,900 in March of this year, when Bitcoins reached their peak historic value of $88,131.29 each.

Meme coins cannot be used as a form of currency. They are wholly speculative. They are often described as ownership of a stock if the stock does not represent shares in a corporation that produces and sells tangible goods.

One billion $TRUMP coins were initially created. Two Trump-owned companies own 800 million, while 200 million were publicly released in an initial coin offering on January 17. Less than a day later, the aggregate market value of all $TRUMP coins exceeded $27 billion, indicating that Trump's holdings were worth more than $20 billion. The first lady also launched a meme coin, $Melania. Its value increased by over 24,000% in just a few hours, reaching a market capitalization of more than $5 billion. When it was discovered that 90% of the total supply of the memecoin was held in a single crypto wallet, investors began worrying about a potential "rug pull," in which the token creators dump their shares, causing an immediate price drop and leaving most investors with significant losses.

Trump's meme coin raises serious ethical questions, as there is no record of who is bidding up the value of the coins, including potential foreign interests. In other words, it is difficult to imagine a better vehicle for bribery. Trump even held an "exclusive" dinner for the largest holders of his meme coin at his golf club in Virginia last Thursday, giving the impression that it was a means through which individuals might buy access to the president. Trump's meme coin enterprise is estimated to represent a staggering 40 percent of the billionaire's net worth, having earned him roughly one billion dollars per month since returning to office. 

A stablecoin is a form of digital currency whose value is pegged to a stable asset, such as the U.S. dollar (one coin equals one dollar), making it more suitable for transactions. In March 2025, the Trump family launched its own dollar-pegged stablecoin, USD1, through a company it calls World Liberty Financial. That same month, Abu Dhabi announced it would use USD 1 for its $2 billion investment in Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange that supports Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Altcoins, just before lobbying the administration to ease restrictions on access to Nvidia chips.

Trump isn’t the only one who would benefit from continued lax regulation of digital currencies. Elon Musk plans to utilize his own digital currency to facilitate transactions on his X platform, while Mark Zuckerberg has been working on creating a digital currency for Meta transactions. This was thought to be the reason Musk’s DOGE project was so intent on neutering the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Created in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis and the Great Recession that followed, the agency successfully recovered more than $21 billion for consumers who had been the victims of fraudulent banking practices.

Having practically no oversight on a Wild West of new digital financial transaction platforms is already a scenario rife with potential for fraud and abuse. Without the CFPB, that potential would be amplified exponentially. Practically every major economic crisis this nation has experienced has followed the deregulation of institutions designed to facilitate financial investments and transactions. We’ve seen this story before, and it doesn’t have a happy ending.

Dennis "Mitch" Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times and the host of our weekly podcast. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County government since 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University and later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Click here for his bio. Mitch is also the author of three novels and a short story collection available here.