Rachael Horwitz

The good news: the U.S. is on the brink of enacting rules for digital assets that will make us the hub of a new 21st-century digital financial system.

The bad news: This will create more surface area for financial surveillance under a Nixon-era law.

From @katie_haun 👇

Katie (@katie_haun) sat down with @TechCrunch Editor-in-Chief to talk all things crypto including stablecoins and this part about what comes next 👇

Fintech corp dev execs thinking about m&a attending their first crypto conferences.

Obsessed with @jordihays and @johncoogan bringing up Kohl's Cash in a question about what orgs will issue stablecoins. We love a down-to-earth king 👑

Anti-crypto army rn

In honor of today's vote in the Senate on landmark crypto legislation later this afternoon, here is my history of crypto vibes that led to this moment:

Genesis Block.
Nobody cares. Bitcoin is fringe libertarian experiment. The default mainstream position is apathy but also the media thinks it's vaguely illegal and for criminals.

New Toy.
A few early adopters pay attention. Most of tech still laughs. Early crypto venture funds launch.

Web3.
DAOs will probably save democracy and Ethereum gas fees are . . . quite high. NFTs sell for six figures.

Peak Attention.
More eyes than ever. SBF is on the cover of magazines. CEOs say “blockchain not token.” The crypto "skeptic" sees opportunity and emerges as media darling.

Villain Era.
Dark times for like, three years 😬😪

Rebirth.
Faster, cheaper crypto rails. Stablecoins become indispensable infrastructure. Legacy fintechs integrate crypto rails. BlackRock’s ETF goes live. Bitcoin crosses $100K and your state pension owns the ETF. Regulators move from rhetoric to frameworks. Doesn’t feel like 2017 or 2021 it feels inevitable 🙌

Note this morning that both Founders Fund and Haun Ventures announced *seed* stage deals for teams building in the stablecoin ecosystem with an exclusive in mainstream financial press (in addition to creating direct moments and buzz on X and elsewhere). Why?

As crypto moves further into fintech, the role of mainstream media becomes more important.

Direct-to-crypto works for early adopters and developers. But it doesn’t reach the broader audience that matters for long-term adoption including policy makers, regulators, banks, fintech execs, and institutional investors. These groups still get most of their information from traditional outlets like the FT, Bloomberg, and Axios.

The media landscape today is especially difficult for crypto. Many reporters and editors are skeptical. Some are outright hostile. Even if reporters are crypto-pilled, they face an uphill battle with editors who don't get it. This is true even for projects building in relatively uncontroversial areas like stablecoins or infrastructure.

This is why everyone building in crypto, but especially in payments and RWAs, needs to raise the bar when thinking about comms: no matter how unfair, how biased or antagonistic the media seems, you need comms people that know how to play the game as it is on the board and deliver results. Bonus if someone on your cap table has that skill in-house.

If crypto is going to be part of the next generation of financial infrastructure, it needs to be understood by the people who are responsible for overseeing and integrating that infrastructure and for better or worse the mainstream media is going to make a difference.

The Financial Times take on stablecoins ladies and gentlemen

I’ve always thought “wallet” is not the best name for what we are talking about in crypto and kinda misleading, bet people who don’t pay attention to crypto are confused today. What do you think is a better name for the function of crypto wallet?

I think crypto legislation in the form of the GENIUS Act passing is really similar to the encryption wars of the 90's. Like encryption, crypto has potential for both innovation and carries new legal/social risks. In the 90's the U.S. faced a choice: restrict a powerful technology out of fear, or embrace and regulate it wisely.

We embraced encryption (after a lot of backlash to the Clinton admin earlier proposals) and the result is the secure web, e-commerce, messaging, and the modern internet as we know it.

GENIUS represents a really similar crossroads IMO.

Next time someone claims crypto is uniquely dangerous for sanctions evasion or terror financing, remember this story: in 2023, Iran-backed militias exploited Visa & Mastercard networks to move billions using prepaid cards, cross-border arbitrage, and FX gaps in Iraq.

$450M+ in profits for U.S.-sanctioned groups. So while Visa/Mastercard themselves didn’t violate sanctions (since their Iraqi partners weren’t sanctioned at the time), the scheme functionally enabled sanctioned entities to circumvent U.S. restrictions. All of this happened using traditional financial plumbing considered safe and compliant.

Boring (cool) stuff w/ tailwinds in crypto:
> Payments (stablecoins)
> Tokenized assets
> Going public onchain
> Zero knowledge proofs (data privacy)
> Crypto-native social media
> Next chapter for DeFi - accountability, transparency, institutional-grade rigor for auditable, programmable finance

I really need X to work b/c can you imagine talking about stablecoins on Bluesky?

“As confidence in emerging technologies like crypto and digital assets grows, clients are increasingly open to using stablecoins to streamline payouts, navigate currency fluctuations, and settle with third parties in regions where digital assets are preferred,” John McNaught, head of payouts at Worldpay, said in a news release provided to PYMNTS.

The attempts to position the most boring part of crypto (payments!) as a fever dream of financial anarchy is as bad faith as it is transparent. It’s a boring bill to regulate boring tokens that make dollars programmable, open, and interoperable. That's definitely quietly revolutionary but for regular people who use money on the internet every day.

The Genius Act is basically a regulatory catch-up and while exciting to me, it's actually a straight forward technocratic bill. Stablecoins are literally just a dollar on the internet. A fully reserved, tokenized version of the dollar that can move 24/7, settle in seconds, and be programmed like software.

These authors in this extremely silly piece warn stablecoins might break the dollar system. They *are* the dollar system!! 🤦‍♀️ But better b/c when money moves as easily as email, people don’t need to wait days to get paid, or pay $30 for a wire, or be excluded from the system entirely because they don’t have the right bank or passport. That's why the demand for dollar-backed stablecoins is so huge (even without regulation).

Honestly critics using everything they have on this easy-to-support common sense bill and choosing *not* to keep their powder dry for market structure is very telling.

The attempts to position the most boring part of crypto (payments!) as a fever dream of financial anarchy is as bad faith as it is transparent. It’s a boring bill to regulate boring tokens that make dollars programmable, open, and interoperable. That's definitely quietly revolutionary but for regular people who use money on the internet every day.

The Genius Act is basically a regulatory catch-up and while exciting to me, it's actually a boring, technocratic bill. Stablecoins are literally just a dollar on the internet. A fully reserved, tokenized version of the dollar that can move 24/7, settle in seconds, and be programmed like software.

These authors in this extremely silly piece warn stablecoins might break the dollar system. They *are* the dollar system!! 🤦‍♀️ But better b/c when money moves as easily as email, people don’t need to wait days to get paid, or pay $30 for a wire, or be excluded from the system entirely because they don’t have the right bank or passport. That's why the demand for dollar-backed stablecoins is so huge (even without regulation).

Honestly critics using everything they have on this easy-to-support common sense bill and choosing *not* to keep their powder dry for market structure is very telling.

Crypto people now that lots of normal people want to talk to us (about stablecoins)

Really important to build the muscle from day one to lead through the noise. Crypto founders are particularly good at this because of the nature of this ecosystem.

Thanks @axios!

The GENIUS Act is not just about stablecoins, it’s about whether Congress can meet the challenge of governing in the age of exponential tech.

Even if you hate crypto, you should want the GENIUS Act to pass.

This isn’t like the first wave of the internet. That era gave us new ways to share information. This one is building entirely new economic infrastructure including programmable money, autonomous markets, intelligent agents, etc.

Technologies like crypto and AI are rewiring the foundations of how value moves, how decisions get made, how systems run. And our laws haven’t caught up. In many cases, they don’t even apply.

So far, we’ve defaulted to letting the executive branch and the courts fill the void. Regulating by enforcement and interpreting outdated laws to cover new realities. That’s not sustainable. It’s not democratic. And it’s certainly not a strategy for American innovation leadership.

It is Congress’s job to set the rules of the road. Preferably before crises hit, and before the courts are forced to guess.

The GENIUS Act is a rare, bipartisan shot at doing something different: proactive, clear, targeted legislation for a transformative tech. It’s how Congress starts building the muscle to govern in this new era where the tools move fast, and the stakes are systemic.

One of my fav creators on @zora

https://zora.co/coin/base:0xa489aac30cffde9f34f01b16e2899fe3da7b7f58