US Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has warned starkly against the newly introduced GENIUS Act, which she fears will push a forced agenda in the US for a state-backed Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).
Greene says that despite being pitched as a stablecoin regulatory framework, the bill includes features and control features you would find in a CBDC.
“This bill regulates stablecoins and provides for the backdoor Centralized Bank Digital Currency.” Greene wrote on X.
The GENIUS Act sought legal clarity around issuing stablecoins and operating them in the US. Yet Greene and others fear that under the hood, it effectively enables sweeping financial surveillance and control like state-run digital currency.
Industry voices alarm over privacy risks
There has been fierce support in the broader cryptonetworks community for Greene’s criticism. Her concerns have not gone unheard, with several other leaders and industry experts voicing similar fears, citing that the proposed GENIUS Act threatens to impact the underlying ethos of decentralization in digital currency negatively.
Economist and Bitcoin maximalist Saifedean Ammous, author of The Bitcoin Standard, said in a recent podcast that the US dollar is already, in many ways, a digital currency. He argued that whether in physical form or through an app, the dollar functions as a digital token of the state, monitored and tracked by the government.
Jean Rausis, co-founder of Smardex, said governments understand that controlling stablecoins means controlling financial transactions. He added that with centralized systems, authorities can freeze assets, reverse payments, and track spending, making stablecoins nearly identical to CBDCs.
This sentiment represents a shared skepticism in crypto about any regulatory framework that would put stablecoins under centralized control. Privacy and financial autonomy are the beginnings of a bridge too far. For many of these people, the concepts of privacy and financial autonomy are simply non-negotiable, and any bill that threatens to interfere with these principles is met with outright defiance.
GENIUS Act spurs concerns over financial surveillance
The GENIUS Act has undergone several revisions since its initial release, with the latest major revision being in March 2025. These developments have introduced more stringent AML obligations, “KYC” requirements, and sanctions compliance requirements. And though they have been justified as necessary shields against criminal abuse, critics say they amount to invasive financial surveillance.
Stablecoin issuers would be required to collect and share customer information and track all transactions; they would sometimes need to suspend payments if regulators tell them to, without passing information on why the transactions are occurring. For many in crypto land, this is not one inch closer to authoritarian repression, but a horrifying mile.
This is all fine and good until 10 years later, issuers are required to keep some of that money in regulated banks and go through draconian AML checks, and the government freezes or confiscates the funds like they would any other bank account.
The problem isn’t limited to the United States. The CBDCs are actively being rolled out in other countries, such as China and the EU.
US crypto proponents fear the GENIUS Act, in pretending to support innovation, could take America down that same road, only low-key.
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