Expand the base of stablecoins with a full, audited public inventory of sovereign assets, a proposal to shore up US public debt and to begin reinventing the global financial system.
Stablecoins are moving from the fringes of crypto to the center of finance. The US Genius Act requires issuers to hold reserves one-for-one in cash, deposits, and short-term Treasuries. That makes a digital dollar redeemable. It does not answer a deeper question: what makes money stable?
For a stablecoin, the answer is liquidity. The closer the reserves are to cash, the more credible the promise of redemption. But a token can remain redeemable for exactly one dollar while that dollar loses purchasing power. Redemption and value are different things.
Value ultimately rests on the sovereign behind the dollar. A Treasury bill is a claim on the US government: its power to tax, to borrow, and to honor its obligations. As stablecoins grow, so will their appetite for those claims. Issuers are already significant buyers.
Yet we examine only half of the balance sheet. Debt is explicit. It has a face value, a coupon and a maturity, and markets reprice it every second. The asset side is murky. Washington owns vast tracts of land, buildings, infrastructure, mineral rights, energy resources and spectrum. The Treasury’s latest accounts list $6.1tn of assets against $47.8tn of liabilities, and omit natural resources and stewardship land.
That matters because “full faith and credit” rests on the sovereign’s fiscal capacity, and that includes what it owns. Holders of Treasuries and dollars are implicitly pricing assets no one has counted. Implicit confidence is cheap while it holds and fragile when it does not.
Stablecoin demand makes that confidence look cheaper still. Regulated issuers are a new, structural source of demand for short-dated Treasuries, which eases pressure on government financing just when the fiscal picture is least tested. Nobody knows how much more revenue the US can raise before higher taxes shrink the base, or at what debt level buyers hesitate. When the limits of future revenue are uncertain, the asset side can take on new significance as part of fiscal capacity.
This is not a return to a land standard. Revolutionary France tried one, issuing assignats backed by confiscated church land. They failed not because the land lost its value, but because the state issued far more paper than the land could support. More importantly, a parcel of public land is no substitute for a Treasury bill when someone wants to redeem a dollar this afternoon. Nor should public assets be sold off wholesale; many serve social, strategic or environmental purposes that no market price captures. Backing without discipline and transparency destroys confidence.
The proposal is simpler, and it is preemptive: a full, audited public inventory of what the sovereign owns. What exists, who controls it, what it earns, what it could be worth, and what it is for. The aim is not to offset the debt. It is to show lenders and citizens what stands behind it, before a shock forces the question.
Three things would follow. First, credibility. Markets price what they can see. Second, better stewardship. Governments that do not know what they own cannot manage it, and some assets are surely idle or under-earning. Third, an honest debate. Some assets could be valued and structured without compromising their public purpose; others should never be touched. Only an inventory lets citizens argue over that line with facts rather than instinct.
An inventory might disappoint. That is a reason to want it now, while demand for Treasuries is strong, rather than after a shock.
US states show what is at stake. They cannot print money, so lenders must judge them by what they raise and what they own, which makes asset transparency even more important for them than for Washington. Yet the main rating scorecards are built around cash, reserves and liquid assets; land and other non-revenue-producing public property largely sit outside them. States may be understating their own creditworthiness, and a full count could lift their ratings and significantly reduce their interest expense.
For a useful model, the UK and New Zealand already publish comprehensive government-wide accounts.
The dollar was once anchored to gold. For more than half a century, its value has rested on faith in the American state and its fiscal and monetary institutions. Stablecoins are about to put that foundation under new strain. America should not wait for a reckoning to find out what it owns.
A sovereign is not only what it owes. It is also what it owns.
