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GET READY TO PAY IN ZUCKBUCKS  
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Luke Goldstein
May 23, 2025
The Lever [[link removed]]

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_ The GENIUS Act isn’t just a crypto giveaway — it could turn
tech giants into unregulated banks. _

, AP Photo/Susan Walsh & Mark Lennihan

 

Amid a flood
[[link removed]] of
industry lobbying
[[link removed]] in
Washington, D.C., and Democrats’ capitulation, the Senate is set
to pass
[[link removed]] the
GENIUS Act, a sweeping cryptocurrency law that could spread
fraud-ridden, destabilizing digital currencies across the banking
system. But lawmakers and consumer protection experts warn that the
bill has an even more serious problem: It would allow Elon Musk and
other Big Tech tycoons to issue their own private currencies.

That means we could soon live in a world where all online transactions
will require us to pay for goods in billionaires’ own made-up
monopoly money, for which tech giants will be able to charge
exorbitant transaction fees. 

This scenario isn’t just a pipe dream. It’s a long-running project
by tech platforms to control payment networks. In the past few weeks,
Meta began laying the groundwork once again
[[link removed]] to
launch its own cryptocurrency. 

What’s more, thanks to a bipartisan “compromise” that convinced
Democratic holdouts to support the legislation, the latest version of
the bill could stop the government’s top financial and tech
regulator from overseeing any of these potential tech currencies.

The GENIUS Act, which stands for Guiding and Establishing National
Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins, was designed to create light-touch
regulations for stablecoins, a more commonly used form of crypto
tokens that is often pegged
[[link removed]] to
the U.S. dollar in an equivalent value (one stablecoin is redeemable
to one dollar). 

If it becomes law, any banking or even nonbanking enterprise could get
a license to deal stablecoins with minimal oversight. This
could riddle
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entire financial system with volatility and make illicit activity like
fraud and terrorism undetectable while providing major new markets to
the companies issuing the cryptocurrencies. The El Salvador-based firm
Tether is currently the largest trading platform for these
currencies and has faced
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U.S. lawsuits for fraud. 

After some crypto-friendly Democrats temporarily backed away
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their support for the bill earlier this month, Republicans came to the
bargaining table and made what appeared to be some modest concessions
to temper Democrats’ concerns
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Trump’s corrupt use of crypto for personal gain. But a legal
analysis from the Democratic staff on the Banking Committee
just blasted
[[link removed]] this
new version of the bill for allowing Big Tech to create its own
currencies, among a litany of other problems. 

The bill also includes a giant carve-out to ensure Musk’s social
media platform X, formerly Twitter, would not be covered by even
modest restrictions, thereby “gifting the President’s closest Big
Tech ally a competitive advantage in creating his own private
currency,” according to the Banking Committee analysis.

Musk might not be the only one scoring these benefits. The Trump
administration could also waive the bill’s more stringent
requirements for any favored tech company, according to the Senate
Banking Committee staff. 

On top of these carve-outs, a new legal citation slipped
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the bill tacitly strips away the authority of the Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau (CFPB), a key financial and tech regulator, from
overseeing the issuance of stablecoins. The CFPB has been probing Meta
and other tech companies’ payment networks and has taken action to
regulate those platforms like banks. 

Despite these concerns, 16 Democratic Senators just voted
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moving the updated bill to a floor vote, which all but guarantees its
passage through the Senate. Just two Republicans, Sen. Rand Paul
(R-Ky.) and Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kans.), voted
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measure, disfavoring
[[link removed]] federal
intervention to assist crypto and Big Tech. 

According to Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee, their
colleagues have now given license to the kind of outright pay-to-play
that Democrats had claimed to oppose in the original version of the
GENIUS Act. 

The tech giants that stand to benefit from the bill funneled millions
of dollars to key swing-seat candidates this past election. Those
include vocal crypto allies Sens. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Elissa
Slotkin (D-Mich.), who each received
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million from political action committees funded by cryptocurrency
interests. The Protect Progress PAC, the Democratic arm of the crypto
lobby’s campaign spending operations, spent
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million on both primary and general election races in 2024. 

Tearing Down The Firewall

The GENIUS Act is ostensibly geared toward assisting cryptocurrency
companies whose lobbying groups have pushed
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for the bill. But Brian Shearer, a former senior adviser at the CFPB
and legal expert at Vanderbilt University, argues that the
legislation’s implications will be far more wide-ranging across
nonbanking industries. 

The bill's language erodes
[[link removed]] a 200-year-old
legal standard that mandates a separation between banks that deal in
financial products and commercial enterprises that sell goods. The
division was put in place to prevent industrial firms from
accumulating too much power in finance, enabling them to restrict
competitors or consumers from accessing banking. 

In the past, blurring the lines between finance and commerce has
caused major problems. 

For example, within the financial sector, the 1999 repeal
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the Glass Steagall Act under former President Bill Clinton removed a
long-standing barrier between the riskier business of investment
banking and the more stolid side of commercial banking, which just
deals with managing depositors' accounts. Financial experts cite
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law’s repeal as helping to pave the way for the 2008 financial
crash. 

While that outcome may sound extreme, the point, Shearer says, is that
“even minor disruptions to the fundamentals of financial regulation
can have these profound consequences to the whole financial system.”
Regulators have warned
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a potential financial collapse if crypto is allowed to infiltrate
traditional banking markets. 

The GENIUS Act also comes at a time when financial regulators, led by
the CFPB, have been cracking down on Big Tech for using its market
power to force user adoption of its own payment processing services,
which come with high transaction fees.

Apple, Google, and Meta each run their own payment networks, and Musk
has previously indicated
[[link removed].] his
desire to integrate payment services into X’s social media
platform. 

Apple Pay has developed the most advanced online payment system, with
nearly 800 million global users. As part of a Department of
Justice antitrust lawsuit
[[link removed]],
Apple stands accused
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forcing users and developers to adopt its payment network. 

Former CFPB lawyer Brian Shearer explains that under the GENIUS Act,
Apple could launch its own stablecoin “payment card,” which would
hold customers’ deposits and give the tech giant even greater access
to financial and transaction data on its users. 

Meta has laid out perhaps the most elaborate plans for issuing its own
currency. In 2019, company CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced
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launch of Meta’s own crypto token known as Libra but pulled back
because of blowback from global and U.S. regulators. Federal
regulators, including Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, warned
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lax oversight on financial products like Libra could pose a risk to
financial markets. For example, there’s no deposit insurance
coverage for payments held on tech platforms. 

Meta’s announcement of Libra drew scrutiny from the CFPB,
which opened an inquiry into Big Tech payment networks. Following
the probe, the agency issued rules in 2024 holding tech-based payment
services to the same regulatory standards
[[link removed]] as
other financial institutions and applying fraud, privacy, and other
consumer-protection laws
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stablecoins.

Shortly after the rules were announced, Zuckerberg complained
[[link removed]] about the CFPB’s
actions on _The Joe Rogan Experience_ podcast, and Musk called
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the agency to be shut down. 

Now, the latest version of the GENIUS Act could strip the CFPB’s
authority to enforce those rules. Without the CFPB’s involvement, a
patchwork of other, less robust financial regulators would be left to
monitor these potentially harmful practices. 

As the legislation makes its way through the Senate, reports
[[link removed]] have
emerged that Mark Zuckerberg is once again considering a company
stablecoin. One reason cited
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the move would be to make it easier for Meta to pay content creators
overseas without dealing with cumbersome international banking
procedures. 

If lawmakers pass the GENIUS Act and allow Meta’s plans to move
forward, the corporation could essentially become its own financial
institution for an existing customer base of nearly 4 billion global
users across its social media platforms. 

“Big tech wants to open their own banks, which they can’t do under
existing bank regulations,” wrote
[[link removed]] Shearer on the
financial policy site _Open Banker_. “We know this is a real threat
because Meta has already tried it and failed once before.”

_[xxxxxx moderator - related article:_

_Trump Wants Big Tech to Own the Dollar
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Yanis Varoufakis
Project Syndicate
Two parallel monetary systems – one based on public monies issued in
China, India, and maybe the eurozone, and the other comprising private
money, increasingly dominated by dollar-pegged stablecoins – appear
to be emerging. Central bankers are not the only ones who should feel
anxious.]_

_LUKE GOLDSTEIN is an investigative journalist based in Washington
D.C. He was most recently a writing fellow at the American Prospect
and was with the Open Markets Institute before that. Signal:
310-871-2214._

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* U.S. Senate
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* GENIUS Act
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* Lobbying
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* cryptocurrency
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* Meta
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* Banking system
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* financial regulation
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* CFPB
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