South Carolina Governor Signs Bill to Protect Bitcoin Miners and Ban CBDC

Governor Signs Bill Protecting Bitcoin Miners

South Carolina Governor Timothy Massad, has officially signed a bill to protect bitcoin miners and ban CBDC development.

Timothy Massad is not a crypto enthusiast looking for headlines. He is the former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a man who spent years at the highest levels of American financial regulation, and when he speaks, serious people listen. On Tuesday, standing before an audience at the Digital Money Summit 2026 in London, Massad said something that Washington would rather he had not: a U.S. government-backed digital dollar is not just possible. It is, in his words, inevitable.

“We don’t have a central bank president who is going to get out there and speak about wholesale or retail CBDC, but that does not mean that we are not looking at how to create one,” Massad said in an interview with CoinDesk on the sidelines of the event.

Let that sit for a moment.

This is the same United States whose president, Donald Trump, stood on the campaign trail in March 2024 and told a roaring crowd, “As your president, I will never allow the creation of a central bank digital currency.” Nine months later he was in the White House, and just this year, an initiative to ban the Federal Reserve from issuing a digital dollar passed the Senate in a staggering 89 to 10 bipartisan vote. The bill is now attached to a housing package and faces a potentially rocky road in the House of Representatives. But the political posture from Washington has been unmistakably clear: no CBDC, full stop.

Except, apparently, it is not full stop.

Also present at the London summit was Mark Gould, the Chief Payments Executive at the U.S. Federal Reserve. When the topic of a central bank stablecoin came up, Gould shut the conversation down with practiced efficiency. “This is not under our remit,” he said flatly. But then came the telling moment. When asked directly whether a government-backed digital dollar would ultimately fall under the Federal Reserve’s responsibility, he did not say no. He said yes, but not at present.

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Not at present. Those three words carry a great deal of meaning.

Massad’s argument for why a CBDC is unavoidable goes beyond domestic politics. He pointed to the global pressure quietly building around the United States, and specifically to Project Agora, a major initiative led by the Bank for International Settlements that brings together seven central banks to explore how tokenized money can work across borders. The United States is a participant in Project Agora. While American politicians perform outrage at the idea of a digital dollar for public consumption, American central banking officials are sitting at the table with some of the most sophisticated financial institutions on earth, working through the very architecture that a digital dollar would require.

“The U.S. is a participant in Project Agora,” Massad said pointedly, making clear that the work behind closed doors is moving forward regardless of what gets said at political rallies.

The underlying force driving all of this is Europe. International central banking experiments with stablecoins and tokenized settlement rails are advancing at a pace that is beginning to make American financial policymakers quietly uncomfortable. The fear, which Massad articulated directly, is that if the United States refuses to build government-endorsed settlement infrastructure for onchain money, it risks ceding ground to Europe in the next generation of global financial plumbing. And that is not a risk any serious American financial regulator is prepared to accept without a fight.

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In a private conversation with CoinDesk after the panel session, Massad went even further. He said that while the Trump administration will continue to publicly insist that a formal retail CBDC is off the table, the relentless evolution of tokenized finance will eventually force the government’s hand. A government-backed alternative to private stablecoins will come, he argued, not because Washington wants it, but because the financial world will demand it.

This is how history tends to move in finance. Not with grand announcements and ribbon cuttings, but through the slow, grinding pressure of market reality colliding with political resistance until one of them breaks.

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