Over the last few years, the rise of digital assets, with their speed and transparency, has increasingly permeated the global financial system and economies in many jurisdictions. Recent events by the US government's focus on efficiency, DOGE, has now turned its full attention to the US Department of Treasury and its central bank, the Federal Reserve System.
Source: Doge
Over a decade ago, the rise of Bitcoin as a speculative instrument with an innovative non-inflationary value, coupled with its transparent ability to move with minimal cost value anywhere and anytime at the push of a button, gave the banking and financial industry its first insight of how it would be transformed into DOGE compliant banking. Fast forward ten years, the USDC stablecoin (backed by Goldman Sach, BlackRock and Fidelity) has a yearly transaction volume of 18 Trillion US Dollars. Furthermore, SWIFT Data reveals that the US Dollar is fast displacing the second largest currency, the Euro, in all transactions world-wide © Statista 2025. A sudden ‘de-Euroization’ is happening and unfortunately Europeans seem increasingly impotent to arrest the Euro’s slump - the fall in use can be possibly attributed to expansion of the US economy relative to Europeans, or the increasing adoption of the US stablecoins as the global exchange medium.
Source: Payments cards and mobile.com
What’s happened to the EURO portends the same for other global currencies:
The Great Britain Pound (GBP) is following the same trajectory as the Euro. As the rise of USD stablecoins are increasing through positive US banking legislation and resulting legacy US bank adoption, the natural effect is the use of GBP in the UK is being diminished and supplanted by the use of USD stablecoins. According to a recent analysis of Ethereum node deployment (one of the largest USDC networks) by ethernodes.org and assuming an equal usage distribution for USDC, this would indicate the UK represents a potential exposure to 4 percent use of the recent $18 trillion of USDC worldwide yearly transactions - notwithstanding the complicated and subjective algebraic analyses employed to calculate USDC usage.
To put this in perspective, an equivalent of 23 percent of the UK's GDP (£2.53 trillion) is using USDC in transactions. Consequently, this has a significant deleterious impact on UK monetary and fiscal policies. Furthermore, to compound the sense of evitability, the major competitor to USDC, Tether is significantly larger (double the size) and in no doubt adding to the effect more than USDC.
The UK economy is increasingly choosing not to use GBP currency in its transactions, and it has instead chosen to use the more efficient, transparent, digital asset ‘stores of value’ of US stablecoins, a voluntary adoption of DOGE compliant assets:
US stablecoins are having an outsize effect on smaller economies. Because of the US economy's size compared to other smaller ones, the practicable advantage of using US stablecoins is too overwhelming for local and international businesses to disregard. Like many other developed countries' banking systems, the UK banking industry is fast approaching the point of no return. Using the current USDC yearly growth rate of 50 percent, the UK will potentially pass the 50 percent mark of an equivalent of its GDP being conducted in USD stablecoins in just 24 months. It is not just the US that is assessing the impact and benefits of digital money. In a recent speech at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in London, the Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Baily, said: “I think the question is how do we get the benefits of digital technology in the world of payments. If we were to assume there are no benefits of digital technology in the world of payments, we would probably be failing the test of imagination,” using the analogy of when Apple introduced the iPhone. Apple surveyed potential customers, asking whether they would like a phone with certain characteristics, and most respondents said, “no - that’s a failure of imagination”. Meanwhile in Europe, Nordea’s Chief Digital Currency Strategist, Ville Sointu, claims that: “20 major eurozone banks are currently assessing the financial impact of this sweeping change, which would require updates to everything from ATMs to mobile banking apps by the end of the decade.”
Increasingly, users and customers are making their own choices to which ‘money’ to use for storing value and in their transactions. The relatively ‘few’ governments and legacy banks are only now recognising future transactions will increasingly have little to do with them in their current form. Banks are, however, still needed for ‘trust’ and ‘verification’ (‘on-boarding’ of assets and customers as well as the ‘off-ramps’ when value is exchanged back into the legacy economy). To remain relevant (and to be able to collect taxes and fees in this new digital, asset-based, AI enabled, title economy), banks need to embrace the new technologies and payment alternatives and their core value propositions. Banks and governments can still be relevant - they need to quickly adapt - before their taxes and fees move to more efficient offerings and systems.
Transparency and trust in government currencies:
The recent global reporting of the DOGE US government audits is increasingly exposing the questionable use of sizable amounts of taxpayer funds in government agencies. DOGE has recently cancelled $17million that was being spent on a tax advice project in Libera. The sums and use of the funds have been called into question by most of that country’s tax paying citizens and it is alleged that significant misuse has taken place. As evidence of these expenditures continues to be revealed, the use of public digital assets for the real time, public oversight of government expenditures is now being actively considered as a means of curtailing governments from printing their own money for non-governmental political objectives. Tying government money and budgets to real world, intrinsic value assets, just like the banks and financial institutions, stops ‘money printing’ and enforces public transparency.
So, are we seeing the inevitable shift? Are governments losing control of money? Undoubtedly, a financial revolution is unfolding. USD-backed stablecoins, once a niche innovation, are now reshaping the global monetary system - challenging traditional currencies, central banks and even governments themselves. For governments and central banks, the implications are existential. But what happens when monetary policy is no longer in their hands? What happens when citizens and businesses voluntarily abandon fiat currency in favour of faster, borderless and programmable digital money? The financial system is facing its "Uber moment” - just as ride-sharing disrupted taxis, stablecoins are disrupting fiat system. Governments can either adapt, integrating stablecoins into their frameworks, or risk becoming irrelevant in the digital economy. The world is making its choice. The question now is: will governments accept the new reality, or will they fight a battle they can’t win?
This article first appeared in Digital Bytes (18th of February, 2025), a weekly newsletter by Jonny Fry of Team Blockchain.