Wyoming makes gov fintech history with launch of first US state-issued stablecoin

The US state of Wyoming has this week announced the ‘mainnet’ launch of its own stablecoin – the Frontier Stable Token (FRNT).

FRNT is a groundbreaking digital money programme for the public sector as the first fiat-backed, fully-reserved stablecoin issued by a public entity in the US – an eye-catching development given that traditional stablecoins are issued by private companies.

The project is being led day-to-day by the Wyoming Stable Token Commission, which was established more than two years ago (March 2023) through the Wyoming Stable Token Act. The state government is backing the Wyoming Stable Token Commission with a budget of $5.8m (about £4.3m).

In an announcement from state capital Cheyenne (19 August), the state government described the ‘pioneering state-issued stabletokens’ as ‘ushering in a new era of digital finance’ in a ‘historic move.’

A mainnet launch is a reference to the official activation of a blockchain network – its transitions from a testing environment (‘testnet’) to a live, operational state where real transactions and applications can occur. FRNT is pegged 1:1 to the US dollar.

STABLECOINS: EXPLAINED Stablecoins (also known as stabletokens) are a type of digital asset / cryptocurrency, minted on a blockchain network, that seek to maintain a stable value by having their market value pegged to an external reference, most commonly fiat (traditional currency).

Fintech-friendly Wyoming

With a population estimated at just under 600,000 people, Wyoming is the US’s least populous state despite being the tenth largest by area. But it has been undertaking numerous legislative, policy and marketing initiatives to position itself as a fintech and blockchain-friendly location – as exemplified by FRNT.

FRNT is designed to provide ‘secure, transparent and efficient digital transactions for individuals, businesses, and institutions – worldwide’, according to a press notice issued by state governor Mark Gordon’s office.

“For years, Wyoming has been the leading state on blockchain, cryptocurrency and digital asset regulation, passing over 45 pieces of legislation since 2016,” said Gordon, who is also chairman of the Wyoming Stable Token Commission, in the release. “The mainnet launch of the Frontier Stable Token will empower our citizens and businesses with a modern, efficient and secure means of transacting in the digital age.”

The Frontier Stable Token will be fully backed by US dollars and interest-bearing US Treasury securities, held in trust.

FRNT ‘fortifies its stability’ with a legislatively-mandated remit to achieve 2% overcollateralization,’ the press notice states. (Over-collateralization is a financial strategy where a borrower provides collateral worth more than the loan amount).

RELATED ARTICLE US state of Wyoming ‘rapidly advancing’ towards stablecoin issuance – a news story (11 February 2025) on progress towards the stablecoin’s launch

Seven blockchains

FRNT makes use of blockchain technology to offer ‘instant transaction settlement, reduced fees and enhanced accessibility for all users,’ the press notice states.

This means users can send FRNT instantly and cheaply between any of these networks, while Wyoming maintains complete control over the currency’s issuance and compliance.

FRNT is launched as a single, unified digital currency across seven blockchains – Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon and Solana – that were chosen via what the press notice describes as a ‘robust candidacy’ process.

Further private-sector suppliers include LayerZero Labs (‘token issuance partner’), Fireblocks (blockchain infrastructure), Franklin Advisers (reserves management), Inca Digital (‘open-source intelligence’) and The Network Firm (‘financial audit and monthly attestations’).

At time of writing (20 August), the stabletoken’s website ( states that FRNT is ‘not currently available for purchase’. But the press notice states that FRNT will be made available for purchase ‘on the Solana blockchain through Wyoming-domiciled digital asset exchange Kraken in the coming days, as well as Rain’s Visa-integrated card platform on the Avalanche blockchain.’

The release adds that ‘public availability will be noticed with a distribution [announcement] from this office and the Stable Token Commission.’

FRNT’s launch coincides with the ‘Wyoming Blockchain Symposium 2025’, which is being held this week in the resort town of Jackson Hole. The event includes a fireside chat today (20 August) during which Gordon will ‘detail the Cowboy State’s eight-year history of passing forward-thinking legislation around digital assets and the benefits of the Wyoming Stable Token for consumers, his state and the nation,’ according to the pre-event marketing.

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‘Start-up within state government’

Among the key figures driving the programme is Wyoming Stable Token Commission executive director Anthony Apollo, who gave the inside track on the initiative during an online broadcast organised by the Digital Euro Association (DEA) earlier this year (27 January).

Delivering a slideshow-style presentation followed by a Q&A, Apollo described the team he leads as “trying to create essentially a start-up within the context of US state government.”

DEA strategic advisor Conrad Kraft introduced the broadcast – titled ‘The Wyoming Stablecoin –State-Backed Digital Innovation’ – by describing stablecoins as “bridging the gap between traditional financial systems and blockchain technology”.

These digital currencies offer, he said, the “promise of secure, efficient and transparent transactions with the potential to transform everything from cross-border payments to public sector operations”. Wyoming, he added, has “positioned itself at the forefront of this movement, creating a blueprint for what state-backed innovation can look like.”

Apollo, who took up his role in September 2023 after working in the private sector, said that (at the time) Wyoming lawmakers have passed about 45 pieces of digital asset-related legislation since 2016. He described the stablecoin as “meant to function as glue between some of these different and disparate initiatives.”

He described the Commission’s $5.8m budget as “not very big… but perhaps appropriate” given that it is public funding. This capital is ultimately due back to the state’s general fund. The aim is for the Commission to be self-sustaining.

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‘Killer app’ for blockchain

The stablecoin is, Apollo explained, “intended to look a bit like” pre-existing stablecoins that are similarly pegged to the US dollar such as USDC, a stablecoin issued by Massachusetts-headquartered Circle, and PayPal’s PYUSD, “with some differentiators.”

Treasury purchases funded by the programme should generate interest income that will be transferred to a ‘Wyoming School Foundation Program’ that is run by the state’s Department of Education. So, the more people use the stablecoin, the more schools should potentially benefit.

Since he began in the role, his office had received an “extensive amount of inbound interest” from more than 730 individuals across more than 360 organisations, as well aspirant “vendors who want to help build” the Wyoming Stable Token, he said.

“We want to make sure this has all the best practices of existing incumbent stablecoins, and go a little bit further than that,” he said.

Apollo set the state’s efforts within the context of stablecoins’ growth in popularity worldwide, describing these digital currencies as “really [having] emerged as the ‘killer app’ for blockchain.”

Stablecoins’ global total market value is about $215 billion (about £173 billion), he said (the market value has grown since).

RELATED ARTICLE Trump signs stablecoin act into law as Washington steps on crypto gas – a news story (21 July 2025) on the GENIUS Act (see below)

Global ambitions

Wyoming’s ambition for the initiative is ultimately global. The intention is for the Wyoming Stable Token to be “certainly a domestic product and then international and also on DeFi platforms,” Apollo said. (‘DeFi’ is an abbreviation for ‘decentralised finance’; a ‘defi platform’ is a reference to peer-to-peer trading).

“It might take some time for us to get there,” he explained. “There might be some beta testing involved and making sure we have the appropriate compliance framework in place. But we do intend to be used pretty much anywhere that incumbent stabletokens are utilised.”

Wyoming’s initiative comes to fruition just weeks after US president Donald Trump signed a law to establish a federal regulatory regime for stablecoins in a move closely watched by public- and private-sector fintech and payments specialists worldwide.

The law was signed after the House of Representatives passed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act (GENIUS Act) on 17 July by 308 votes to 122 during what US lawmakers dubbed ‘Crypto Week’ in Washington DC.

As Trump signed the act into law (18 July), the White House released a ‘fact-sheet’ describing GENIUS as a ‘historic piece of legislation that will pave the way for the United States to lead the global digital currency revolution.’

RELATED ARTICLE “There’s a case for stablecoins across all government departments…” – an article based around a speech titled ‘Why the UK Public Sector Should Embrace Stablecoins’ given by Lord Holmes at an event in London on 26 June 2025

Global currency context

During the webinar in January, Apollo also sought to explain the rationale for the Wyoming initiative in the context of the trajectory of US national debt and the dollar’s global power.

The US government has about $36 trillion (about £29 trillion) of debt “and counting… it’s a big number,” he summarised. “We [the US government] need buyers of this debt. We’re going to keep selling it or creating USD – printing USD. If you look at fiat-backed stablecoins and aggregate [them], they would represent a top 20 holder of US debt.”

He also highlighted an opinion piece (article) authored by former Speaker Paul Ryan in the Wall Street Journal published on 13 June 2024 (‘Crypto Could Stave Off a US Debt Crisis’ and sub-titled ‘Stablecoins backed by dollars provide demand for US public debt and a way to keep up with China’).

In respect of the dollar’s global power, the currency is on one side of almost 90 per cent of all global foreign exchange (FX) transactions.

“However, with the sanctions activities of the prior [president Joe Biden] administration, many nation states have begun selling off dollars that are in their treasury,” Apollo said. “If we need some kind of digitised dollar that will be more liquid [and] can settle anywhere in the world almost instantaneously to help increase the US dollar’s hegemony […] stablecoins have certainly been identified as a way to do that – and protect the USD as the world’s reserve currency.”

RELATED ARTICLE ‘Biased, confusing, used inconsistently…’: fintech terminology dissected in ECB paper – a news story (17 March 2025) on a 49-page European Central Bank (ECB) working paper (‘Digital money and finance: a critical review of terminology’) in which the authors stated that ‘public sector institutions have a responsibility to help the public understand new technologies within the scope of their mandates’ – and that ‘sound terminology is the very basis for this’ (‘stablecoin’ was among the terms criticised)

Promoting FRNT’s benefits

Further challenges ahead range from how to encourage people to understand and actually use the Wyoming Stable Token to technical considerations related to the tokens’ security.

As to the public communications challenge, Apollo was of the view that “most people know what stablecoins are and how they work.”

“However, for members of the public who may not be aware of what blockchain is, [and have] heard negative things about crypto, there will be a bit of a hurdle here to explain how stabletokens can benefit both users and retailers or even institutions in that it would be very efficient, lower fees, etc,” he said.

He provided a single sentence that he felt summarises the project: ‘a Wyoming stabletoken released on a public blockchain can be used to settle dollar-denominated transactions of any size anywhere on Earth in seconds, incurring fees less than one cent while minimising counterparty risk.’

In respect of security considerations, Apollo said that the “hope” was to incorporate technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs or homomorphic encryption “to the extent that the State of Wyoming can have visibility into who is using the token but perhaps it’s obfuscated on a public blockchain itself”.

A related angle is the possibility of what he described as ‘malicious actors’ snapping up Wyoming’s stablecoins. “We need to make sure that Wyoming Stable Tokens do not end up with malicious actors,” he said, mentioning groups including North Korea’s ‘Lazarus Group’. “We need to make sure that if stabletokens ended up where we don’t want them, we have the ability to perform some kind of interdiction.”

ZERO-KNOWLEDGE PROOFS & HOMOMORPHIC ENCRYPTION: EXPLAINED A zero-knowledge proof is a method of proving the validity of a statement without revealing anything other than the validity of the statement itself ///Homomorphic encryption allows computations to be performed on encrypted data without compromising the encryption

Yield-bearing potential

During a Q&A, Apollo was asked whether incentives were planned to encourage the stablecoin’s use.

Among the options being considered was for the token to “natively bear yield”, he said. But he cautioned that this was at present a “very high-level concept” and would “require a significant amount of work from a compliance perspective”. This would not, he emphasised, happen “from day one.”

“But states do have some exemptions around securities laws,” he continued. “If you look at the SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] and the environment here in the US, a lot of the yield-bearing stabletokens have gone offshore.”

He was also asked what progress he envisaged the initiative making in five years and whether he could envisage other US states “jumping in and competing with” Wyoming.

Answering the second part of the question first, he said that “if we launch this programme and it becomes successful, because everything we do is public, it’ll be pretty easy for any other state to kind of copy-and-paste the work that we’ve done.”

In respect of the five-year horizon, he responded that he hoped that the programme had “really taken off” within that timeframe, including “contributing well into the state’s budget”.

RELATED ARTICLE Stablecoin market ‘clamouring’ for regulatory certainty amid ongoing ‘stigma’ – a report from an event in London (‘Stablecoin Symposium’ on 18 March 2025)

Post-launch ambitions

Apollo emphasised that the Commission’s “one, very specific remit” (at time of the online broadcast) was to issue the Wyoming Stable Token.

“My hope is that, in the future, this Commission can look more like other agencies within the state that have multiple divisions,” he said. “I would hope that someday perhaps this is the ‘Wyoming Digital Asset Authority’ and stabletokens is one division thereof. I would hope that we can, in time, have a division for tokenised real-world assets. This state is rich in gold and silver, land and livestock, oil and gas, rare-earth metals that are being used for AI [artificial intelligence] GPUs [graphics processing units], and even uranium. These are things I would like to put on [block]chain.”

In this vein he mentioned the possibility of using blockchain during political elections. “That, to me, will be downstream of robust solutions around digital identity,” he said. “I would hope in the future that a division within this agency can handle on-chain voting tied to some kind of digital ID that would help really shore up elections and make sure there’s no fraud.”

“That’s my five to maybe seven-year plan,” he concluded. “I’ll add an extra two years on it!”.

In a LinkedIn post on 19 August, LayerZero Labs opined that ‘there’s no clearer signal of where finance is heading than a US state putting the dollar onchain’ (meaning ‘on blockchain’).