The Stablecoin

What the book covers

A stablecoin is a token issued by a private company that promises to be worth one dollar. The company keeps that promise by holding dollars and short-dated United States Treasury bills, which makes the largest issuers standing lenders to the American government. In July 2025 Congress gave them a federal charter, the GENIUS Act. The Act fixes what an issuer may hold and who may issue a stablecoin. It also sets what the issuer must be able to do with a token when a court or an agency orders it.

Private digital money now finances part of the federal debt, and the Treasury welcomes it; the statute and the published data show how. The book sets out what the Act changes for banks, for savers and for the wider economy. A holder is taxed on a token, and forgoes interest on it. What the Act's compliance provisions mean in practice is set beside the account closures reported from Vietnam and Thailand and the cashless programme in Dubai. Each case is given as the authority stated it: the legal basis, the date, the number as the source gives it, and what happened to the money.

Most of this is not new. The National Bank Acts of 1863 and 1864 created private banks that issued dollar notes backed by government bonds deposited with the Comptroller of the Currency, so that a wartime Treasury gained a buyer of its debt while the public got a uniform currency. The free banking era before it, the bank holiday of 1933, the money market funds of 2008 and the deposit conversions in Cyprus in 2013 each answer the same two questions: under what law, and what happened to the money afterwards. The strongest case for the Act is given fairly before the book answers it. What the law permits is kept separate from what a future government might do with it.

Why Felix Nikolas Prehn wrote it

In December 2025 Felix Nikolas Prehn read of bank accounts closed in Vietnam for lack of biometric verification and of new transfer controls in Thailand. A five-month-old American law sat on his desk. The Stablecoin is his account of what a stablecoin is and is not, built from the statute and the published data. The book makes no prediction about the end of physical cash.

Chapters

1. Chapter 1. A Dollar That Is Not a Dollar
2. Chapter 2. The Buyer of Last Resort
3. Chapter 3. The GENIUS Act, Read
4. Chapter 4. The Clause
5. Chapter 5. Tether's Ledger
6. Chapter 6. What Happens to the Banks
7. Chapter 7. The Tax on a Digital Dollar
8. Chapter 8. Three Countries
9. Chapter 9. Bonds Behind the Notes
10. Chapter 10. Money Under Orders
11. Chapter 11. The Case for the Act
12. Chapter 12. Where the Money Has Gone
13. Afterword

Sources

Every statutory statement is footnoted to the section of the Act, and every number to its source. Where a figure is rounded in the text, the exact figure and its date appear in the footnote.

Editions

Also by Felix Nikolas Prehn

Book 1

The Inflation Tax

How Governments Erode Debt and Savings

Book 2

The Petrodollar

How oil made the dollar the world's money, and why that is changing