Wyoming’s cryptocurrency is available for purchase
After announcing last August that the state would distribute its own digital currency, Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon on Wednesday announced that the Frontier Stable Token, bearing the ticker FRNT, is now available for purchase on the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken.
Several analysts last summer painted the state-issued digital currency as a gimmick — one with “no use case,” one researcher attested. Gordon himself started as a skeptic, in 2023 allowing the enabling legislation to become enacted without his signature and warning that it contained vague provisions and lacked a “solid plan.”
The governor has since come around, and on Wednesday declared his state as “an innovation leader for our nation.” He noted in a press release that the digital currency “further demonstrates the strength of our enterprise and provides our citizens, businesses, and the nation a cheaper, faster, and more transparent means of transacting.” He also pointed out that any interest accrued from the new currency’s proceeds will enter a fund for the Wyoming School Foundation.
Government-issued cryptocurrencies remain rare. Some cities have experimented with slapping municipal branding onto digital coins, but advocacy for such efforts has largely evaporated since it became clear that very few people were interested in trading their United States dollars for MiamiCoins, for instance.
North Dakota, the only other state government to have undergone a similar effort, last October announced the Roughrider coin, a digital currency named after the volunteer cavalry who fought in the Spanish-American War under a pre-presidential Teddy Roosevelt. That currency is available initially only for use by banks, to speed along transactions and to create more “stability,” according to one of the project’s organizers, though he said the state plans eventually to sell digital coins to the public also.
State legislatures each year field dozens of new cryptocurrency bills, each met in turns by fervor or apathy. Advocates of “strategic” bitcoin reserves, many of them Republican, hail such efforts as essential to maintaining economic relevancy. Texas state Sen. Charles Schwertner last summer referred to bitcoin as “digital gold” and a “critical asset for the future,” before his bill passed, creating the Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and funding it to the tune of $10 million, in a state looking at a biennial budget of $338 billion.
Just weeks earlier, though, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs had already vetoed legislation that could have shifted as much as 10% of the state’s funds into cryptocurrency. Hobbs, a Democrat, pointed out that Arizona’s retirement system is “one of the strongest in the nation because it makes sound and informed investments.” Virtual currencies, she said, are “untested.”
Such legislation continues to arrive in fits and starts. There are bills pushing for new investigative committees and task forces, or seeking permission for agencies to accept cryptocurrencies as payment for fees and taxes, a thing a handful of states and cities now allow, though participation is limited. Since Colorado’s Revenue Department began accepting crypto in September of 2022, it’s received 113 payments, a spokesperson shared last October, with 2025 setting “a department record.” The total value of those payments is about $115,000.
In Florida, a state where the governor last year signed a bill recognizing gold and silver coins as legal tender, lawmakers on Wednesday introduced a bill that would allow the state’s chief financial officer to administer a “strategic” cryptocurrency reserve. Maine lawmakers last October moved along legislation to create a “special commission” on crypto and blockchain, the distributed-ledger system undergirding cryptocurrencies. Conservative Arizona lawmakers, undeterred by their naysaying governor, in December prefiled a bill that would allow the state to forge new agreements with cryptocurrency exchanges and eventually accept digital currencies as payment for “fines, civil penalties or other penalties, rent, rates, taxes, fees, charges, revenue, financial obligations and special assessments.”
Recent history is littered with many more state cryptocurrency and blockchain bills that have been introduced and then summarily ignored. Even crypto boosters who manage to find legislative support are often soon stymied by those who don’t share their enthusiasm for the future of finance. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul last December vetoed a bill that would have created a state cryptocurrency and blockchain study task force, evidently not because she had anything in particular against it, but because it had no obvious funding source. With one signature, she eliminated the idea along with those contained in 17 other bills that called for various commissions and task forces the state didn’t care to pay for.
Georgia is among the states sheltering those who consider rigorous support for cryptocurrencies an existential issue. H.R. 905 would “encourage” the state’s Education Department to create a public awareness campaign for students, kindergarteners through seniors in high school, on the merits not only of crypto, but blockchain and other “Web3” technologies, a suite of software imagined as a means of reorganizing the internet around decentralization, improved privacy and, apparently, expensive but worthless image files. The bill’s sponsors, all Democrats, wrote that “Web3 represents the future of the internet and how businesses will interact with each other,” and that with regard to non-fungible tokens, “the digitized art market is only just beginning.” Their proselytizing around Phoenix has so far been ineffective — the bill did not inspire further action beyond its first reading last April.
