As Congress Bickers, the Rest of World Recognizes Stablecoins

Sadly, I must open up this week’s newsletter on a down note.

On Monday, CoinDesk made the necessary but extremely difficult decision to let go of 24 colleagues — the bulk of them from our editorial operations — to reduce costs in the face of a brutally challenging market for crypto media revenue. Every one of those people was a vital contributor to the high standards of journalism that have made CoinDesk a household name in the world of crypto.

They helped us win awards — a Polk award, a New York Press Club award and, just this week, a finalist listing for this year’s Loeb awards. They contributed to the best “play for each other” spirit I’ve ever encountered in a newsroom. They made working at CoinDesk exciting and rewarding. They are all, already, sorely missed. I wish them all the very best and hope that one day I have the pleasure of working with some or all of them again.

You’re reading Money Reimagined, a weekly look at the technological, economic and social events and trends that are redefining our relationship with money and transforming the global financial system. Subscribe to get the full newsletter here.

Also, another downer: This will be the last Money Reimagined for 2023. I’m putting the newsletter on hiatus to free up time to write a book – more details on that later – and to address the challenge of thinner staffing resources at CoinDesk. It will resume publication in January.

My weekly Money Reimagined podcast, with Sheila Warren, will continue, however. This week, we feature a conversation with Frank McCourt, the construction magnate, philanthropist and founder of Project Liberty, an initiative aimed at fixing a broken internet. Frank, who is co-authoring the book mentioned above, makes the compelling point that decentralized storage solutions will allow society to break its toxic dependence on large, data-hogging internet platforms.

And now for the main column of the week.

What now for U.S. stablecoins?

As a divided Congress readies to vote on – and quite possibly kill – a new bill that would regulate stablecoins, it’s worth reflecting on how far ahead of the U.S. other jurisdictions are in this process and what the United States’ laggard status might mean for the dollar’s place in the future of money.

• The Monetary Authority of…