In January 2026, Wyoming launched America’s first state-issued stablecoin with a government agency of five people into a market where Tether alone holds nearly $200 billion. Anthony Apollo, e
In January 2026, Wyoming launched America’s first state-issued stablecoin with a government agency of five people into a market where Tether alone holds nearly $200 billion.
Anthony Apollo, executive director of the Wyoming Stable Token Commission, recently joined TheStreet Roundtable to explain how its stablecoin, FRNT, wasn’t made to compete with industry giants like Tether and Circle.
"If we were going to come out as a government agency with a team of five trying to take on Tether or Circle... I don't think we'd make it very far," he said. "I really do see us as fit for a different purpose, as a public good."
He believes that the next 10x won’t come from issuers poaching each other’s customers, but from governments joining to rails, and Wyoming wants to be the template.
Related: JD Vance reveals Bessent's 'discreet plan' to fix $40 trillion debt
Stablecoins have grown at an astonishing rate in 2025 and 2026. At the beginning of 2025, the market cap of all stablecoins was roughly $205 million. Today, it sits at over $300 million, and both financial institutions and the US federal government don’t see it slowing down anytime soon.
"We've hit this $300 billion of issuance kind of threshold and it's kind of plateaued a little bit there. Yet we're still hearing from Citigroup's research, we're hearing from our Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, that this is going to be a three to four trillion dollar industry in the next five-ish years," Apollo explained.
Citi’s research projects stablecoins reaching multitrillion scale before 2030. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has publicly cited their work and predicted that stablecoins will be a $3.7 trillion market before the end of the decade.
https://x.com/SecScottBessent/status/1935027160374210573
That number represents more than a 10x increase in the stablecoin market, and Apollo believes that number won’t be reached without state-level actors jumping in.
"That implies a 10x from here. So who has to come on board to make that 10x happen? From where I'm sitting, that's work that's gonna be done at the state and federal government level, and with different trade corridors around the world," he said.
As far as how governments can use stablecoins, he argued that agencies can use them to save money through capital efficiency gains or bring in new revenues from fees and interest earned on reserves that back issued tokens.
"We are working within the state of Wyoming... an intra-agency working group... to figure out how our agencies can save money or bring in revenues with a stable token based on their current operations," Apollo said.
What turns Wyoming’s experiment into a national story is a piece of legislative housekeeping that most people missed. According to Apollo, the state legislature passed a statutory amendment earlier this year giving the commission “an explicit authority to issue tokens on behalf of other states, kind of through a white-label or branded issuance."
The logic is the same that makes any franchise work. The first mover already paid the startup costs. Wyoming spent years assembling the stack another state would need: the Stable Token Act, the commission, the vendor relationships, the reserve management, and multichain deployment.
As Apollo put it: "We've already got the offering. We can provide it for other states."
He says that he has met with about two dozen states and territories, finding several interested parties and even a few that are “ready to go,” with multi-state working group expected before the end of the year.
The goal of the working group is to turn Wyoming’s setup into a “repeatable legal, operational, and technical model so that other states can have their own."
New Hampshire has also established a commission to study stable tokens, modeled partly on what Wyoming has already built.
Apollo also offered Florida as a potential partner.
"If New Hampshire and the New Hampshire Stable Token Study Commission wants one — well, we've got no issues, no impediments, to issuing a Granite State stable token," Apollo said. "Or a Sunshine State stable token for Florida, who has the GENIUS Act at the state level already in place — and their bill to enable that also included a mandate to do a stablecoin pilot."
The endgame isn’t fifty competing state tokens. It’s fifty branded storefronts on one set of rails, each pitched to its own agencies as a way to save money, reduce the taxpayer burden, bring in new revenue, and more.
It’s a strange and telling inversion of the usual government and crypto story. The state isn’t attempting to regulate its way into the stablecoin market. It’s entering as a vender, selling statehood-as-a-service to other governments, and using the Treasury Secretary’s own forecasts as the market sizing.
