Money is moving onto new rails, built in code instead of wires and vaults, and that shift is quietly reshaping a tool that America has relied on for a generation: the ability to see a transaction, trace it, and freeze or seize it the moment sanctions or law enforcement demand it. Whoever builds and supervises those digital rails inherits that power. Whoever doesn't, loses it. That is the real stake in the debate over blockchain-based payment technology. Not the technology itself, but who ends up controlling it.
China and Russia understand this. Beijing is swiftly shifting to its digital yuan, e-CNY, and is settling commodity trades with BRICS partners in yuan. Moscow is pushing ruble settlement with its own trading partners via its regulated ruble-based stablecoin network A7A5. Both are explicit, funding bets on moving international trade beyond the reach of U.S. sanctions and U.S. oversight. Neither has cracked the dollar's dominance yet, which still captures 88% of foreign exchange transactions. But if either succeeds in becoming the default rail for the next generation of cross-border payments, America doesn't just lose market share—it loses its reach into the global financial system with sanctions and anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism, effectively handing the keys to the global financial system to our geopolitical foes.
I've spent my career on the U.S. side of this problem, first as an attorney at the Department of Homeland Security and later at the Treasury Department working anti-money-laundering and sanctions cases, and today as the Bank Secrecy Act Officer at Anchorage Digital Bank, N.A., the first federally chartered digital asset bank in the United States. The lesson is simple: The global economy craves an international currency, and the U.S. dollar has held that position since Bretton-Woods. American power depends on the U.S. dollar's continued dominance worldwide, and that dominance depends on deep, liquid capital markets, strong institutions and rule of law, and military and geopolitical power—resulting in America's ability to see, trace, and freeze global assets when it needs to. And that leverage only exists when dollars move through systems that the U.S. can actually supervise.
There's a common misconception that digital assets are harder to trace than traditional finance. It's actually the opposite. Cash leaves no trail at all. A bank wire leaves a record, but that trail typically goes cold after a few transactions. A public blockchain transaction, however, leaves a permanent record of every movement, from the moment a token is issued to the moment it's redeemed. Bringing this activity onshore, under U.S. supervision, extends that visibility. Pushing it offshore limits it.
Stablecoins, digital tokens pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar, are already a multi-hundred billion dollar market, and industry data put the US dollar-pegged share at roughly 90 percent globally. When a stablecoin is issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, it operates under the same rules as any U.S. national bank—full reserve backing, segregation of customer funds, and Bank Secrecy Act, anti-money laundering, and sanctions compliance obligations. That supervision is also what gives the government its edge. Every transaction is a record the United States can see, trace, and, when law enforcement requires it, freeze or seize in real time. When that same activity happens offshore, outside any regulator's perimeter and visibility, the U.S. loses that line of sight entirely.
The stakes are not only strategic. They're also human. Consider what dollar stablecoins already mean, for example, in Venezuela, Argentina, and Turkey, where ordinary people hold and transact in US dollars, as much as possible, because their own currencies and banking systems have failed them or been weaponized against them. A family in Caracas holding a US dollar stablecoin is protected from a currency collapse in a way a bolivar denominated bank account is not. That is happening now, delivered by infrastructure that an authoritarian regime cannot freeze the way it can freeze a domestic account, with or without U.S. participation in building the digital rails underneath it, which is exactly why the United States has an interest in making sure that infrastructure is built responsibly, transparently, and under a regulatory framework that keeps it trustworthy at scale, rather than leaving it to whichever jurisdiction is willing to host it with the least oversight.
That means finishing the job Congress started. Treasury, the OCC, and FinCEN should implement GENIUS Act rules that keep issuance onshore, supervised, and interoperable with existing sanctions and AML programs, not slowed by duplicative reporting or ambiguity that pushes issuers back offshore. And Congress should pass the CLARITY Act to extend that same regulatory perimeter to the rest of the digital asset market, including exchanges, broker-dealers, and platforms that still operate today with little or no federal oversight. Every rule that keeps this activity under U.S. supervision is a rule that keeps the dollar, and America's ability to enforce sanctions, at the center of the global financial system.
When the United States built and opened the Global Positioning System, it didn't just launch satellites; it established a silent, invisible utility that now powers the modern world. Because America laid the groundwork and set the standards, we secured a generation of technological and strategic leadership. The next version of that global utility is being built now, in code, including the rails, the standards, and the supervision beneath them. Dollar stablecoins are already flowing into economies around the world, with or without a decision from Washington. The only open question is whether that infrastructure is American-built and American-supervised, or whether the United States cedes the ground to adversaries already working to bypass the dollar. GPS was a choice. So is whether we write the rules for the next generation of global payments, or let our adversaries write America out of it.
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