The Stablecoin Revolution: How Digital Dollars Are Reshaping Money, Power, and Global Finance (2025)

Stablecoins have evolved from experimental crypto assets into a $296 billion cornerstone of digital finance, processing over $27 trillion annually—more than Visa and Mastercard combined. These cryptocurrencies designed to maintain stable value relative to reference assets like national currencies represent both the democratization of money and its potential capture by tech giants and financial institutions. As comprehensive regulations like Europe's MiCA and the US GENIUS Act reshape the landscape, stablecoins force a collective reassessment of what constitutes "money" in the 21st century.

Introduction

Stablecoins are crypto-assets designed to maintain a steady value, typically by pegging one-to-one to a reference asset like a national currency [1]. By linking their price to an external anchor (often the US dollar), stablecoins aim to solve crypto's notorious volatility and serve as a reliable medium of exchange or store of value [2]. Originally emerging around 2014, stablecoins remained a niche for several years. But their use has exploded recently, with total transfer volume reaching $27.6 trillion in 2024—reportedly exceeding the combined volume of Visa and Mastercard transactions that year [2].

This surge underscores how stablecoins have become de facto digital cash in the crypto economy, enabling everything from trading and decentralized finance to remittances and payments. Yet beneath their promise of stability lies a complex web of technical architectures, economic theories, regulatory challenges, and social implications that deserve careful examination.

There are several types of stablecoins, distinguished by how they achieve price stability. Fiat-collateralized stablecoins are backed by traditional assets denominated in fiat currency—each Tether (USDT) or USD Coin (USDC) is nominally backed by $1 in reserves held by the issuer [1]. Crypto-collateralized stablecoins use other cryptocurrencies as collateral, with users locking volatile crypto into smart contracts to mint smaller amounts of stablecoins in over-collateralized positions. Algorithmic stablecoins hold no traditional reserves but attempt to maintain parity via algorithms and token economics, though Terra's $40 billion collapse in May 2022 illustrated the fragility of purely algorithmic designs [3].

Technical Foundations

Blockchain Architecture and Multi-Chain Deployment

Stablecoins straddle both blockchain networks and traditional financial infrastructure, embodying what Simmel called money's evolution toward pure abstraction [6]. They can be issued on one or multiple blockchains—Tether's USDT launched on Bitcoin's Omni layer, migrated to Ethereum's ERC-20 standard, and today circulates on at least a dozen networks. USDC is natively issued on over 25 chains.

This proliferation across networks reflects Hayek's vision of competing currencies, where different blockchain ecosystems compete on speed, cost, and functionality [7]. Multi-chain deployment occurs through two primary methods. Native issuance involves the issuer maintaining a consolidated reserve while deploying contracts on each supported chain—Circle follows this model with USDC. Wrapped or bridged tokens see third-party bridges lock a stablecoin on one chain and issue equivalent versions on another, introducing additional custodial risk if bridges are compromised.

Multi-chain support expands utility but complicates liquidity and risk management. Liquidity can fragment across chains, creating what Baudrillard might recognize as multiple simulacra of the same underlying asset—each chain's version becomes a representation of a representation, with price discrepancies revealing the hyperreal nature of digital value [10]. Bridging brings significant security risks—historically, cross-chain bridge flaws have led to some of the largest crypto hacks.

Reserve Management and Transparency

A stablecoin is only as good as its reserves—a principle that exemplifies Simmel's insight that money's value stems from social trust rather than material substance [6]. Fiat-backed issuers claim 1:1 backing by high-quality assets, typically including cash in insured banks, Treasury bills, and money market instruments. Tether reported over $118 billion in assets by early 2025, with the majority held in short-term U.S. Treasuries, making it one of the world's largest non-government holders of T-bills.

This arrangement creates what Graeber would recognize as a new form of authority—not traditional governmental legitimacy, but a techno-financial legitimacy based on transparency reports and attestations. However, lack of transparency breeds doubt. Tether faced criticism for years over opaque reserves and was fined $41 million by the CFTC in 2021 for misleading the public about being "fully backed" at all times. In response, major issuers now publish periodic attestations—Circle releases monthly reserve reports with accounting firm attestations.

The reserve system reveals stablecoins' fundamental contradiction: they promise the stability of traditional finance while operating in crypto's trustless paradigm. This tension between the need for institutional backing and the desire for decentralization echoes what Graeber would see as the enduring power of debt hierarchies—even revolutionary technologies like blockchain ultimately get absorbed into existing structures of financial obligation and control.

Administrative Controls and Compliance Features

Unlike Bitcoin, many stablecoins operate as upgradeable smart contracts under company or governance control. Issuers often retain abilities to freeze tokens or blacklist addresses involved in crime or sanctioned activities. Both Tether and Circle have used admin powers to block illicit funds when requested by authorities. After the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Tornado Cash, Circle promptly blacklisted 38 Ethereum addresses, freezing about $75,000 of USDC.

These admin functions add compliance layers and security capabilities but mean users ultimately trust authorities not to censor arbitrarily. The ability represents both a safety feature and a risk vector that auditors warn could be exploited if admin keys are compromised.

Economic Function and Monetary Theory

Simmel's Vision of Money as Pure Abstraction

Over a century ago, sociologist Georg Simmel described money as a symbol—a claim upon society deriving value from social trust and human relations rather than intrinsic material properties [6]. In The Philosophy of Money, Simmel observed that as economies develop, money becomes increasingly abstract, moving from barter to gold coins to paper notes and beyond [6].

Stablecoins represent the next step in this evolution—entirely virtual tokens with no inherent value whose worth hinges completely on collective agreement that they represent one US dollar. They illustrate Simmel's "cultural journey from substance to function" in money, taking even paper out of the equation and existing as ledger entries in decentralized databases [6].

Simmel noted that money's power comes from what it enables—universal exchange and measuring disparate values on a common scale—rather than from what it is [6]. Stablecoins epitomize this principle, valuable to users not as investment assets but as transactional media and stores of stable value in the digital realm.

Hayek's Competing Currencies Realized

Friedrich Hayek's 1976 work The Denationalisation of Money questioned why governments hold monopolies on issuing money, proposing that private currencies competing in free markets would drive issuers to offer the most stable, reliable money to gain users [7]. Hayek believed competition could discipline currency quality better than government monopolies prone to inflationary abuse [7].

Stablecoins manifest many aspects of Hayek's vision as privately issued currencies circulating alongside sovereign money. In the crypto ecosystem, tens of billions of USD-pegged stablecoins compete not only with each other but with government fiat for users' preference in digital transactions. Users effectively "vote with their wallet"—many Asian traders choose USDT while US-based users might favor USDC, reflecting differences in trust and convenience [14].

However, Hayek also recognized challenges now visible in stablecoin markets. Network effects favor a few dominant currencies rather than myriad equal competitors—USDT and USDC command the lion's share while dozens fight for scraps. The temptation for issuers to renege on promises corresponds to maintaining full reserves in the stablecoin world, where any hint of insolvency would collapse business models [15].

Regulatory Authority and Legitimacy

Graeber's Debt Framework and Digital Money

David Graeber's groundbreaking work Debt: The First 5,000 Years fundamentally challenges conventional narratives about money's origins and nature, offering crucial insights into stablecoins' emergence. Where traditional economics posits that money evolved from barter to solve the "double coincidence of wants" problem, Graeber demonstrates that debt relationships preceded both barter and coinage. Money, in his analysis, emerged not as a neutral medium of exchange but as a way of quantifying and transferring social obligations.

This perspective reframes stablecoins not as mere technological improvements to currency, but as new mechanisms for encoding and transferring debt relationships in digital form. When Circle issues USDC against dollar deposits, it creates a debt instrument—Circle owes holders one dollar on demand. The "stability" derives not from the backing assets alone, but from the credibility of this promise within existing debt networks that connect crypto markets to traditional finance.

Graeber's insight that "money is not a thing but a social relation" becomes particularly relevant in understanding why certain stablecoins succeed while others fail. Tether's dominance despite transparency issues reflects what Graeber would recognize as the power of established debt relationships—traders trust USDT not because of perfect reserves, but because of its deep integration into global crypto trading networks where millions of debts are denominated and settled in USDT daily.

From a Weberian perspective, regulators seek to imbue stablecoins with rational-legal authority by crafting laws that bring them under official oversight, thereby legitimizing some while marginalizing others. This dynamic appears most clearly in the European Union's approach through the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation.

MiCA: Europe's Regulatory Framework

MiCA creates two stablecoin categories: asset-referenced tokens (ARTs) backed by multiple assets, and e-money tokens (EMTs) effectively functioning as single-currency stablecoins. EMT issuers must be licensed as e-money institutions or banks and hold 1:1 reserve assets denominated in the reference currency. They must offer redemption at par on request and meet strict prudential, governance, and disclosure requirements.

This regulatory approach reveals what Graeber would identify as the state's attempt to maintain control over debt relationships. By requiring licenses and reserves, regulators ensure that stablecoin debt obligations remain anchored to traditional banking systems and state-backed currencies. The requirement for "redemption at par" essentially mandates that stablecoin issuers honor their debt obligations in state money, preserving the hierarchy where government currencies remain the ultimate settlement layer.

ECB Executive Board member Fabio Panetta has been vocal that stablecoins "are not risk-free" and must not displace public money without safeguards. Panetta warned that if big tech firms issued stablecoins fully backed by central bank reserves, they could rapidly become close substitutes for official currency and "displace sovereign money…with far-reaching implications."

Within this framework, Europe has encouraged initiatives like AllUnity's EURAU stablecoin—a project designed for MiCA compliance. In mid-2025, AllUnity, a joint venture involving Deutsche Bank's DWS, Galaxy Digital, and others, secured a German e-money license to launch EURAU. This case signals institutional legitimacy through co-option rather than prohibition, allowing private entities to create new forms of debt instruments while keeping them tethered to existing financial hierarchies.

Global Regulatory Convergence

The regulatory picture elsewhere follows similar patterns. In the U.S., multiple bills including the Stablecoin TRUST Act and the proposed GENIUS Act of 2025 set federal standards requiring issuers to hold at least $1 of high-quality liquid assets for every $1 of stablecoin issued. These typically mandate that issuers be chartered entities subject to oversight and forbid commingling or risky deployment of reserve assets.

PayPal's 2023 launch of PYUSD under a New York trust charter exemplified how private stablecoins can gain legitimacy by aligning with existing financial rules. By July 2025, landmark U.S. legislation to regulate USD stablecoins had reportedly passed, with supporters arguing it "legitimises the asset class [and] reinforces the US dollar's dominance" in global finance.

Media, Symbols, and Hyperreality

Baudrillard's Simulacra in Digital Finance

Jean Baudrillard's concepts of simulation and hyperreality offer provocative parallels to stablecoins [10]. These tokens function as simulations of money that, in certain contexts, operate as fully as "real" money. Large portions of crypto trading and decentralized finance conduct business in stablecoins without participants ever touching actual dollars.

In these digital arenas, stablecoins become the money—perfect simulacra of dollars for practical purposes. People measure profits, debts, and prices in these units interchangeably with USD. Baudrillard might suggest stablecoins exemplify hyperreal currency: copies so faithful and ubiquitous that originals (sovereign dollars in bank accounts) are rarely needed or experienced [10].

This media-symbolic perspective appears in how stablecoins are portrayed and used. Tether became a character in crypto media—a source of constant speculation yet a linchpin of daily operations. Its value largely held, suggesting collective belief in the symbol was strong enough to sustain the peg even when transparency was lacking.

The Machine Economy Revolution

Stablecoins enable machine-to-machine interactions in ways that extend Baudrillard's simulation concepts toward a realm he could barely have imagined. With the rise of Internet of Things and autonomous AI agents, devices and algorithms need to transact value seamlessly with minimal human intervention. Stablecoins emerge as ideal currency for machine economies because they provide stability while being digitally native and programmable.

But this development represents more than mere technological advancement—it heralds what Baudrillard would recognize as the ultimate hyperreality: a world where symbols interact with symbols at scales and speeds that transcend human comprehension [10]. Experimental platforms already show AI agents buying data or compute power using stablecoins, conducting millions of micro-transactions per second based on algorithmic decisions that no human operator fully understands. Smart electricity meters could autonomously purchase extra energy when prices drop, while AI writing assistants pay per-use for premium language model access through streaming micropayments.

This creates what we might call the "economy of pure simulation"—transactions occurring between artificial entities using symbolic money (stablecoins) to exchange immaterial goods (data, computational cycles, algorithmic insights). The "desert of the real" that Baudrillard described becomes literal: underlying these countless digital exchanges, human economic activity becomes increasingly irrelevant [10]. The machine economy operates in its own hyperreal layer, where the simulacra of money (stablecoins) facilitate exchanges of simulacra of value (digital services) between simulacra of economic actors (AI agents).

Simmel's vision of money as pure abstraction reaches its logical conclusion here—tokens that represent dollars facilitating exchanges between artificial intelligences for purely digital goods [6]. The social trust that Simmel identified as money's foundation transforms into algorithmic trust, where smart contracts automatically enforce agreements between machines that operate beyond human supervision or comprehension.

Social Impact and Creator Economics

Lanier's Vision of Micropayment Internet

Tech critic Jaron Lanier has long advocated reforming the internet's economic architecture so users and creators earn micropayments for value contributed online rather than being exploited for free while Big Tech monopolizes profits [11]. Lanier's vision in Who Owns the Future? calls for internet-built universal micropayment systems to facilitate direct payments [11]. His argument aligns remarkably with Simmel's observation that money's evolution toward abstraction enables more precise and flexible value exchange [6].

Stablecoins provide key enabling technology for Lanier's ideal by combining programmability of digital currency with fiat stability, making frictionless tiny transactions feasible. With stablecoins, payments of $0.0001 for single page views or API calls become technically possible through smart contracts with virtually zero fees on scalable blockchains. This realizes Simmel's insight that money becomes more powerful as it becomes more abstract—digital tokens can be divided and transferred with precision impossible in physical currency [6].

Early glimpses include Web browsers experimenting with token rewards and Twitter enabling USDC tipping for creators. The advantage is that stablecoins don't force creators or fans to speculate on volatile tokens—they can transact in currency holding purchasing power. If a musician sells songs for 5 USDC each, she knows that represents roughly $5 in spending power, unlike volatile crypto alternatives.

Yet this system also embodies Hayek's warning about currency competition potentially favoring convenience over stability [7]. While stablecoins enable the micropayment economy Lanier envisions, they also create new dependencies on private issuers whose promises of stability could prove fragile during crises—as USDC's brief depeg during the Silicon Valley Bank collapse demonstrated.

Platform Power Dynamics

However, platforms themselves might harness stablecoins to entrench power, creating what Lanier would recognize as new forms of digital feudalism. Facebook's abandoned Libra project would have given billions of users a Facebook-issued digital currency tightly integrated with social media. While regulators blocked it over sovereignty concerns, the concept persists—PayPal's PYUSD aims to reduce dependence on card networks while giving PayPal more transaction control.

This tension illustrates Graeber's insight about the political nature of debt relationships. Would users accept a Facebook-issued stablecoin based on the company's technical promises, or would they recognize it as a new form of corporate scrip designed to capture and control their economic relationships? The regulatory rejection of Libra suggests that when it comes to money—the quantification of social debts—traditional state authority remains paramount.

Lanier would likely caution that who controls the "ledger" matters for user empowerment. Open stablecoins like DAI or USDC might be neutral enough to support healthier creator economies, whereas walled-garden coins could replicate current system pitfalls in blockchain form. The difference between democratizing money and merely digitizing existing power structures may depend on whether stablecoin systems embody Simmel's vision of money as a social institution serving universal exchange, or Graeber's warning about how debt relationships can become instruments of domination when controlled by powerful interests.

Critical Analysis

The Stability Illusion

Despite remarkable growth, stablecoins carry significant risks that challenge their core promise—risks that become more philosophically troubling when viewed through our theoretical frameworks. The stability has proven fragile, with major security incidents across protocols revealing systemic vulnerabilities extending beyond technical implementation. Terra's $45 billion collapse demonstrated that algorithmic mechanisms can fail catastrophically when confidence erodes [3]—a perfect example of Baudrillard's warning about the dangers when simulations lose their connection to underlying reality [10].

Even fiat-backed stablecoins briefly depeg during crises—USDC fell to $0.877 during Silicon Valley Bank's collapse in March 2023. This event illuminated the paradox that haunts all stablecoins: their promise of stability depends on the very traditional financial system they claim to transcend. The "hyperreal" digital dollar proved vulnerable when its real-world foundation shook, revealing how simulations remain tethered to the realities they represent, no matter how autonomous they appear [10].

Power Concentration Paradox

While stablecoins promise democratization of money—fulfilling aspects of both Hayek's competitive currency vision and Lanier's user-empowering internet [7][11]—market dynamics favor consolidation around dominant players. Tether's 68% market share creates systemic risks comparable to "too big to fail" banks, while regulatory compliance costs averaging $10 million annually exclude innovative but under-resourceed competitors [15].

This concentration contradicts Hayek's assumption that currency competition would remain vigorous and prevent monopolistic behavior. Instead, network effects and regulatory barriers create the same winner-take-all dynamics that Lanier criticizes in social media platforms. The result mirrors traditional finance rather than disrupting it, suggesting that what Graeber calls "debt imperialism"—the tendency for existing financial hierarchies to absorb and redirect new forms of value creation—may be more durable than technological optimists hoped.

Surveillance and Privacy Concerns

Every stablecoin transaction creates permanent, analyzable records enabling comprehensive financial profiling—a development that transforms money from Simmel's neutral medium of social exchange into what could become an instrument of social control. Pattern analysis algorithms can identify spending behaviors, political affiliations, and social relationships with unprecedented precision.

More troubling still, programmable money capabilities could enforce social credit systems or political compliance automatically—representing qualitative shifts from money as neutral medium to money as control tool. In Graeber's framework, this represents the ultimate evolution of what he calls "bureaucratic surveillance"—the quantification and monitoring of social relationships that debt systems enable. Combined with Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality, we risk creating systems of social control where the simulation of free exchange masks an underlying apparatus of surveillance and manipulation.

When combined with the machine economy's autonomous transactions, this creates the possibility of what we might call "algorithmic debt peonage"—systems that automatically create and enforce obligation relationships faster and more pervasively than any human authority while maintaining the appearance of neutral market mechanisms.

Democratic Deficits in Governance

Current stablecoin governance reveals significant democratic shortcomings. Technocratic bias excludes ordinary citizens from meaningful participation in complex smart contracts and cryptographic systems. Plutocratic tendencies emerge through token-weighted governance concentrating voting power among large holders. Regulatory capture risks increase as industry-government cooperation may prioritize institutional interests over public welfare.

Case Studies

Tether: Dominant but Controversial

Tether (USDT) proved demand for digital dollars, especially in crypto trading, embodying both the promise and perils of Simmel's vision of money as pure social symbol [6]. As of 2025, with market capitalization over $140 billion accounting for 60-65% of all stablecoin value, USDT became essential infrastructure despite—or perhaps because of—its contested relationship with transparency.

The company's journey illustrates Baudrillard's insight about the power of simulation: Tether's dominance suggests that in the hyperreal economy of crypto trading, the symbol of the dollar (USDT) became more useful than the dollar itself. But Graeber would add a crucial dimension—Tether's power comes not just from simulation, but from its role as the dominant unit for denominating crypto debts. Millions of loans, derivatives, and trading positions are denominated in USDT, creating a vast web of obligations that reinforces its centrality regardless of reserve transparency.

However, its path included transparency controversies—the company long claimed 1:1 dollar backing without audited proof, leading to CFTC fines for misleading claims about reserves. Despite improvements including quarterly attestations and safer Treasury-heavy reserves making Tether one of the world's largest T-bill holders, the company still resists full audits and maintains murky offshore governance. Yet markets continue preferring USDT for liquidity and convenience, particularly in Asia where crypto-native solutions outweigh regulatory preferences.

This persistence demonstrates what Graeber would recognize as debt's social power—once USDT became embedded in global crypto debt relationships, its utility transcended questions of formal backing or regulatory approval. The platform's dominance reveals how, in competitive currency environments, users may prioritize network effects and liquidity over transparency and regulatory compliance—at least until a crisis tests these priorities.

World Liberty Financial: Politics Meets Finance

USD1 from Trump family's World Liberty Financial represents explicit political branding in stablecoins. Launched amid Trump's return to office and his endorsement of pro-stablecoin legislation, critics viewed it as blurring public policy with private interest. The timing raised eyebrows about quid pro quo patterns involving Binance partnerships and Justin Sun investments coinciding with regulatory developments.

USD1 tests whether stablecoins can gain traction through ideological affinity beyond technical merit. From Graeber's perspective, this represents an attempt to leverage charismatic authority to bootstrap new debt relationships—using Trump's political brand to convince supporters to denominate their crypto activities in USD1. The project illustrates how money creation remains fundamentally political, even when dressed in technological innovation.

AllUnity's EURAU: Compliance-First Approach

AllUnity's EURAU exemplifies institutional approaches, bringing together Deutsche Bank's DWS, Galaxy Digital, and others to deliver fully regulated euro stablecoins for Europe [12]. Securing BaFin's Electronic Money Institution license in July 2025 made AllUnity among the first through post-MiCA licensing requirements [12].

EURAU represents convergence of traditional finance and crypto—effectively electronic money on blockchain, overseen by bank regulators, designed for fintech and corporate use cases while plugging into DeFi applications needing euro tokens. Its success will test whether regulatory blessing can overcome network effects favoring established USD stablecoins.

Conclusion

Stablecoins have evolved from experimental assets to foundational infrastructure processing more transactions than traditional payment giants. They force reassessment of money's nature in the digital age, sitting at intersections of technology, finance, and social trust while balancing competing priorities between innovation and stability, efficiency and control.

The regulatory response through frameworks like MiCA demonstrates attempts to harness benefits while preserving monetary sovereignty. Yet fundamental tensions remain between trust and code, institutional legitimacy and market adoption, symbols and reserves. These digital tokens illuminate that money's stability emerges from social structures—a point both stablecoin developers and regulators continue grappling with [6].

Looking forward, stablecoins will likely integrate further into mainstream finance while coexisting with central bank digital currencies, creating what Simmel might recognize as a new stage in money's social evolution [6]. Their success depends on maintaining delicate balances: technical robustness without excessive complexity, regulatory compliance without stifling innovation, and institutional backing without sacrificing the decentralized ethos that sparked their creation.

The emergence of machine-to-machine stablecoin economies suggests we may be approaching what Baudrillard would consider the ultimate hyperreality—economic systems operating in pure simulation, where artificial agents exchange symbolic money for virtual goods at speeds and scales beyond human comprehension [10]. Yet this same technology could fulfill Lanier's vision of a more equitable internet economy, if designed to serve human agency rather than replace it [11].

As Simmel observed, money represents claims upon society [6]. Stablecoins test whether those claims can be digitized, programmable, and globally accessible while preserving the trust networks that give money meaning. Their journey from crypto trading tools to potential foundations of digital commerce reflects broader questions about who controls money, how value flows through society, and whether technology can democratize finance or merely recreate existing power structures in digital form.

The philosophical tensions embedded in stablecoins—between Hayek's competitive ideal and Graeber's debt hierarchies, between Simmel's social money and Baudrillard's simulated reality, between Lanier's empowering technology and the risk of new forms of digital bondage—will likely determine whether these digital tokens become tools of liberation or sophisticated instruments of a new kind of economic domination.

The revolution in money continues, with stablecoins as both catalyst and consequence of deeper changes in how we organize economic relationships in an increasingly connected world.

Published: September 24, 2025

References and Further Reading

[1] Bank for International Settlements. (2021). "Central bank digital currencies: foundational principles and core features." BIS Papers No. 107.

[2] World Economic Forum. (2025). "Stablecoin surge: Reserve-backed cryptocurrencies are on the rise." WEF Digital Currency Governance Consortium.

[3] Reuters. (2024). "Terraform Labs files for bankruptcy protection in US." January 22, 2024.

[4] European Union. (2023). "Regulation on Markets in Crypto-assets (MiCA)." Official Journal of the European Union.

[5] U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. (2021). "CFTC Orders Tether and Bitfinex to Pay Fines Totaling $42.5 Million." October 15, 2021.

[6] Simmel, Georg. (1907). "The Philosophy of Money." Trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. London: Routledge, 1978.

[7] Hayek, Friedrich A. (1976). "The Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined." Institute of Economic Affairs.

[8] Graeber, David. (2011). "Debt: The First 5,000 Years." Melville House Publishing.

[9] Panetta, Fabio. (2022). "Public money for the digital era: towards a digital euro." European Central Bank speech.

[10] Baudrillard, Jean. (1981). "Simulacra and Simulation." Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. University of Michigan Press.

[11] Lanier, Jaron. (2013). "Who Owns the Future?" Simon & Schuster.

[12] Ledger Insights. (2025). "Deutsche Bank's DWS joint venture AllUnity wins EU stablecoin license."

[13] U.S. House Committee on Financial Services. (2024). "Trump's World Liberty Financial Investigation." Committee Report.

[14] Chainalysis. (2024). "The 2024 Geography of Cryptocurrency Report: Regional Preferences."

[15] Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. (2024). "Stablecoin Market Concentration and Systemic Risk."