Circle Urges U.S. Government to Enact Stablecoin Legislation

• Circle’s CSO to ask the U.S. Congress to enact a payment stablecoin legislation.
• Dante Disparte made the request in a speech to be presented to parliament on Wednesday, April 19, 2023.
• According to Disparte, $132 billion of stablecoins in circulation reference the dollar

Circle’s Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Global Policy, Dante Disparte, is set to ask the U.S. Congress to enact a comprehensive payment stablecoin legislation. Disparte’s request forms part of a written speech that he would present to parliament on Wednesday, April 19, 2023, by 10 am ET.

Disparte’s presentation comes up during a presentation titled “Understanding Stablecoins’ Role in Payments and the Need for Legislation.” The presentation aligns with Circle’s long-term advocacy for legislation that protects consumers, supports responsible innovation, and advances U.S. economic growth and national security.

According to Disparte, Circle’s stablecoin, the USDC, is becoming widely accepted as a dollar settlement option among major financial services firms like Visa, MoneyGram, and WorldPay. That contradicts the general view that stablecoins would disrupt traditional financial systems or markets.

The Circle CSO would elaborate on the stablecoin’s support to the dollar, noting that more than $132 billion of stablecoins in circulation reference the dollar. That was made possible by the early adoption of dollars as the currency of reference in digital assets markets. For USDC, Disparte’s published written statement explained that Circle went a step further by adopting macroprudential risk standards and transparency, a hallmark of trust, resulting in a proliferation of enterprise use cases and adoption.

The statement also emphasized Circle’s compliance with existing regulatory standards. He praised the existing regulatory framework in the U.S. and confirmed that it produced an economic development model that enables companies to start up and scale across the U.S.

Disparte noted in the statement that the standards provided by the U.S. enabled Circle to prioritize public-private regulatory partnership and personhood. According to him, Circle has acquired a comprehensive license as a state-supervised money transmission and electronic stored value company in 48 states. It was the first company to receive a Bitlicense from the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) in 2015 and a registered Money Services Business (MSB) conforming with FinCEN’s guidance on combating illicit financial activity.

The Circle CSO intends to urge the U.S. government to take the lead at the national level in defining what is and what is not a payment stablecoin. In the published speech, he warned that failure to do so could expose the system to something similar to the “stable-in-name-only” coin, Terra-Luna emerging into the federal regulatory vacuum.