Fed Governor Christopher Waller:
A Fed governor just said the quiet part loud. Stablecoins started as crypto cash. Today, their issuers are among the largest buyers of short-term US government debt.
Stablecoin supply has grown 462x since 2019. US Treasuries outstanding grew 77% in that same period. The correlation is not accidental.
Currently at 0.8% of the Treasury market, even modest continued growth changes the picture materially. Under the GENIUS Act framework modeling $2-3T in regulated stablecoin supply with 100% T-bill backing, that share rises to 5-8%. That's structural demand — not speculative.
The question Waller's statement forces: is Washington deliberately using stablecoin regulation as an industrial policy tool to expand the buyer base for US government debt? The mechanism works — global dollar demand routes through stablecoins directly into T-bills, no foreign central bank needed.
For the crypto industry, this reframes the regulatory narrative. Stablecoins aren't a threat to the system. They're becoming a feature of it.
Sources: DeFiLlama's LlamaAI, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, BDO/Deloitte/Grant Thornton attestations.