The Capitol was still warming its morning coffee when word spread that Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal had fired a six-page broadside at Mark Zuckerberg. The U.S. senators are probing the stablecoin plans by Facebook again. The letter revives memories of Libra’s spectacular crash-and-burn and drags Meta’s current crypto flirtations onto center stage.
The Democrats demand a paper trail: which firms Meta has courted, how much cash it has spent lobbying, and when a launch could drop. Their message is blunt: The US senators’ probe says the GENIUS Act, now before the Senate, leaves a loophole wide enough for a dollar-pegged truck. “Big Tech currencies threaten competition and privacy,” they warn, asking Meta to respond by June 26.
Scale fuels their anxiety. Meta’s filings show 3.35 billion people use a Meta app every single day, nearly half the planet. Drop a stablecoin into that feed, and PayPal’s user base looks quaint. No surprise, then, that the probe by the US Senators stresses how a payments token could hand Meta mountains of transaction data, supercharging surveillance pricing and raising antitrust alarms.
Even if Meta never mints its token, the Probe by the senators of Facebook argues that funneling billions of transactions through third-party coins still routes the data back to Menlo Park.
But the timing is spicy; the Senate votes on the GENIUS Act next week. The lawmakers ask whether Meta has nudged amendments that would soften a prohibition on big tech ownership of issuers. US Senators Probe Stablecoin Plans by Facebook, warning that a subsidiary or joint venture (Libra 2.0 in all but name) could waltz through the bill’s side door.
Traders, meanwhile, are gaming the odds. Will a fast lane for billions of new stablecoin users juice on-chain volumes, or will Washington clip the wings before liftoff? Whatever your bet, remember this: The US Senators’ probe of stablecoin plans by Facebook is no headline quickie. It is a high-stakes stare-down that could redraw the payment rails of the social web, one Senate vote and one Zuckerberg reply at a time.
