New Hampshire has become the first state to allow the investment of its public funds into crypto assets with its governor signing the new law on Tuesday.

The state beat a number of others to the punch this year as what had started as a surge in state lawmaker momentum had run into roadblocks over recent weeks. As the first to authorize its treasurer to set up such a reserve, New Hampshire could very well beat the U.S. government in forming a stockpile, too.

«New Hampshire is once again first in the Nation,» New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte, a Republican who’s in her first year in office, posted on social media site X.

The New Hampshire bill allows the investment of up to 5% of public funds in a digital asset that has at least $500 billion in market capitalization, currently leaving bitcoin (BTC) as the only qualifying asset.

State House Republicans there also posted on X Tuesday, boasting that their state is «OFFICIALLY the first state to lay the groundwork for a strategic bitcoin reserve.»

«The Live Free or Die state is leading the way in forging the future of commerce and digital assets,» they wrote.

Though Arizona had been the first state to get a similar measure to its governor’s desk, that legislation was vetoed. Florida has also withdrawn its own effort, joining a number of other states where the reserve push has fizzled.

President Donald Trump had called for his administration to set up its own bitcoin reserve and a separate crypto stockpile, though the Treasury Department is still examining what the federal government has on hand that can be redirected into those eventual funds.

Read More: Trump’s Crypto Sherpa Bo Hines Says Crypto Legislation on Target for Quick Completion

Eight decades of dollar history can be read as a three-act play.

Act I was the Eurodollar—off-shore bank deposits that sprang up in 1950s London so the Soviet bloc, European exporters, and eventually every multinational could hold dollars outside U.S. regulation, spawning a multi-trillion-dollar shadow banking base.

Act II was the Petrodollar. After 1974, OPEC’s decision to price crude in dollars hard-wired global energy demand to U.S. currency and gave Washington an automatic bid for its Treasury bills.

John deVadoss will appear in the “IEEE x Consensus Research Symposium: What’s next in Agentic AI?” at Consensus 2025 on May 16 at 11:00am-12:30pm.

Act III is unfolding now. USD-backed Stabledollars (a.k.a. stablecoins)—on-chain tokens fully collateralized by T-bills and cash—have leapt past $230 billion in circulating supply and, on many days, settle more value than PayPal and Western Union combined. The dollar has reinvented itself again—this time as a monetary API: a permissionless, programmable unit that clears in seconds for a fraction of a cent.

Follow the incentives and the shape of the future appears. A Lagos merchant can accept USDC on her phone, skip 20% naira slippage, and restock inventory the same afternoon. A Singapore hedge fund parks cash in tokenized T-bill vaults yielding 4.9%, then routes those dollars into a swap at 8 a.m. New-York time without a correspondent bank. A Colombian gig worker converts weekend wages to digital dollars, bypasses capital controls, and withdraws pesos at a neighborhood ATM—no Friday-to-Monday lag, no 7% remit fee.

Stablecoins haven’t replaced the banking system; they have tunneled around its slowest, most expensive choke points.

Scale begets legitimacy. The GENIUS Act moving through the U.S. Senate would charter stable-coin issuers nationally and, for the first time, open a path to Fed master accounts. Treasury staff already model a $2 trillion stable-coin float by 2028—enough to rival the entire Eurodollar stock of the early 1990s.

That projection is plausible: Tether and Circle command over 90% share with reserves lodged almost entirely in short-dated U.S. debt, meaning foreigners are effectively holding digitized T-bills that settle in 30 seconds. The dollar’s network-effect is migrating from SWIFT messages to smart-contract calls, extending hegemony without printing a single new note.

Yet, the Stabledollar epoch is no risk-free triumph. Private tokens that wrap sovereign money raise hard questions. Who conducts monetary policy when a third of the offshore float lives in smart contracts? What recourse does a Venezuelan family have if an issuer black-lists its wallet? Will Europe—or the BRICS—tolerate a rails-level dependence on a U.S.-regulated asset? These are governance puzzles, but they are solvable if policymakers treat stablecoins as critical dollar infrastructure, not as speculative irritants.

The playbook is straightforward:

1. Impose Basel-style capital and liquidity rules on issuers.
2. Post real-time reserve attestations on-chain so collateral is transparent by default.
3. Mandate inter-operability across blockchains to prevent winner-take-all custodianship.
4. Extend FDIC-like insurance to tokenized deposits so end-users enjoy the same safety net as with bank accounts.

Do that, and the United States creates a digital-dollar moat wider than any rival’s CBDC, including China’s. Shrug, and issuance will migrate offshore, leaving Washington to police a shadow system it no longer controls.

Dollar hegemony has always advanced by hitching itself to the dominant trade flow of the age: Eurodollars financed post-war reconstruction; petrodollars lubricated the fossil-fuel century; Stabledollars are wiring the high-velocity, software-eaten economy. Ten years from now, you won’t see them; they will simply be the water we swim in. Your local café will quote prices in pesos or pounds but settle in tokenized dollars under the hood. Brokerages will sell “notes” that are really bearer instruments programmable for collateral calls. Payroll will arrive in a wallet that auto-routes savings, investments, and charitable gifts the instant it clears.

The only open question is whether the United States will steward the upgrade it accidentally birthed. Stablecoins are already the fastest-growing quasi-sovereign asset class. Harness them with serious rules and the dollar’s third great reinvention writes itself. Ignore them, and that future still arrives—just without the U.S. in the driver’s seat.

Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives derailed what was supposed to be a joint hearing on crypto policy efforts on Tuesday, insisting that President Donald Trump’s personal crypto dealings were too urgent to allow other discussion on instituting industry regulations.

«I object to this joint hearing because of the corruption of the president of the United States and his ownership of crypto and his oversight of all the agencies,» said Maxine Waters, the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, effectively robbing the gathering of its official status that required unanimous consent to proceed with the panel’s joint hearing alongside the House Agriculture Committee.

Waters issued an invitation for people to come join the Democrats in another room «to discuss what we should be discussing: Trump’s crypto corruption.

With raised voices speaking over each other at the start of the aborted hearing, Democrats insisted to their Republican counterparts that the president’s digital assets ties — including his own memecoin and connections to World Liberty Financial — needed to be dealt with. Republicans, having introduced a discussion draft this week on proposed language for a crypto market structure bill, were left to continue a discussion with the witnesses they’d invited.

So, two non-hearings progressed on Tuesday morning in separate rooms, illustrating the sharpening divide between the parties this week on how to move forward on overseeing the digital assets sector.

«A joint hearing has been very, very needed,» said a visibly frustrated Representative French Hill, the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. «I understand the ranking member has concerns, but by objecting to this hearing the ranking member is undermining the opportunity for these two committees to engage in a conversation of vital importance to the American people. That’s a loss for our committee, the House and the public at large.»

At what had technically become a «roundtable» in which the guests were participants, not witnesses, the Republican-driven discussion continued, with former Commodity Futures and Trading Commission Chairman Rostin Behnam arguing the agency needs more authority and funding to occupy a leading role in regulating crypto and Coinbase executive Greg Tusar called the market structure bill a «strong step» toward clarity for the industry.

In the Democrats’ hastily organized meeting, Waters opened with another blast at her opposition.»Since the Republican majority refused to do its job, I’m hosting today’s roundtable to shed light on these critical issues before it’s too late,» she said. And Democrats were ready to discuss their own piece of legislation: an effort to ban top government officials from involvement in crypto assets or businesses

Chastity Murphy, a former aide to Rep. Rashida Tlaib who worked on stablecoin legislation and now a visiting fellow at the University of Manchester, argued in the Democrats’ hearing that not prohibiting lawmakers from holding crypto assets or firms engaging in this kind of business is legalizing «holding public office for profit.» In Trump’s case, not prohibiting his crypto activities also means letting him determine which regulations could be helpful for his bottom line.

Also on Tuesday, Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, introduced a bill to ban senior public officials from backing financial assets, including crypto.

Read More: Leading House Dem Will Block Crypto Market Structure Bill Hearing

Nikhilesh De contributed reporting.