Written by: Bootly
On the map of the United States, Wyoming is often overlooked as a "Western asset."
When mentioned, most people's first reaction is the Old Faithful geyser erupting in Yellowstone National Park, or the year-round snow on the summit of the Grand Teton.
This is the least populated state in the U.S., with fewer than 600,000 residents living on nearly 260,000 square kilometers of land—this number is even less than the population of a suburban town in Shanghai.
In the memory of literature and imagery, it is the cruel wilderness described by Annie Proulx as "irreparable, only to be endured," the mountains of "Brokeback Mountain" where a struggling cowboy spends his life, and the blood-soaked borderland besieged by blizzards in Quentin's "The Hateful Eight."
It is contradictory yet vivid: it is extremely conservative, being the "deepest red" state in the U.S., where the Republican Party has monopolized for forty years. In the 2024 U.S. election, over 70% of voters cast their ballots for Trump. Yet it has also been at the forefront of progress; as early as 1869, it became the first "equality state" in the U.S. to grant women the right to vote.
However, Wyoming is by no means a financial desert. Every summer, a group of the "most powerful" people in the world gathers here: in the tranquil resort of Jackson Hole, the global central bank annual meeting hosted by the Kansas City Federal Reserve takes place. From Greenspan (the 13th Chair of the Federal Reserve) to Powell, every key turning point in global monetary policy has been set in this meadow surrounded by snow-capped mountains.
It is this proud and unique "Western spirit" that will once again bring Wyoming into the public eye in early 2026.
On January 7 local time, the state officially announced the launch of the $FRNT stablecoin, debuting on the Solana chain and supporting six EVM-compatible chains. This is the world's first dollar stablecoin backed by "state government credit."
Mining for Light: The Rebirth of Energy Transition
Wyoming's radicalism stems from a deep-seated financial anxiety: the "underground wealth" that has supported this land for a century is running dry.
As the energy heart supplying 40% of the nation's coal, it once created the myth of a "tax-free paradise" through mining resource taxes: residents do not pay personal income tax, and businesses do not pay corporate income tax.
One important reason is that, with the continuous resource exports from the Powder River Basin, this sparsely populated state has created astonishing wealth: its per capita GDP has long ranked in the top ten in the U.S., and in years of energy prosperity, it can even rival New York and California.
This prosperity once gave Wyoming the confidence to refuse to levy personal income tax, corporate income tax, and inheritance tax. However, this is a fragile prosperity built on heavy industry.
Image source: University of Wyoming Center for Energy Economics and Public Policy
Since 2011, Wyoming's pillar industry has undergone a decade-long "avalanche":
The ruthless market replacement: The rise of low-cost shale gas and renewable energy has completed a dimensional reduction attack on coal in terms of power generation costs.
The tightening of environmental shackles: The advancement of federal carbon emission regulations (such as the Clean Power Plan) has led to the mass closure of coal-fired power plants across the U.S.
The cliff-like fiscal gap: According to official data cited by Wyoming Public Media from CREG, the state's coal resource tax plummeted from $290 million in 2011 to $170 million in 2022, with coal production expected to fall to its second-lowest historical point by 2025, only half of the 2008 peak. The "coal mine lease bonuses," which were once an important source of funding for school infrastructure, have even dropped to zero.
"If we don't make a move, we will be the next West Virginia (note: a traditional mining area in the U.S. that has become one of the poorest states after the decline of the coal industry)." – This painful realization has created a sense of urgency among the most conservative cowboy politicians in the area.
They realize that since they cannot change the trend of energy transition, they must leverage Wyoming's most core asset—extremely free commercial legislative power.
In fact, Wyoming's innovative gene has precedents. In 1977, it was the first in the U.S. to invent the LLC (Limited Liability Company), which is still the most popular business entity today.
Starting in 2018, in order to save itself, this most "red" conservative state was forced to embark on a long journey of institutional innovation in the crypto world.
In 2019, Wyoming passed House Bill 74 (HB 74), establishing a new type of financial entity: the SPDI license (Special Purpose Depository Institution). This is not a traditional bank but an institution that "does not engage in lending activities, only responsible for custody and settlement."
In September 2020, the crypto exchange Kraken obtained the first SPDI license in the U.S., establishing Kraken Bank, marking the first time that crypto assets gained "bank" status under state law.
In 2021, the state was the first to pass the DAO Act, allowing code-controlled organizations to register as legal LLC entities.
As for the newly launched $FRNT, according to the planning of the Wyoming Stable Token Committee (WST), the $FRNT stablecoin is over-collateralized by 102% in U.S. Treasury bonds and cash.
The management of reserves is handled by investment giant Franklin Templeton, which manages approximately $1.6 trillion in assets, while custody is provided by its subsidiary, Fiduciary Trust Company International. Its core business logic is that the state government absorbs dollars, buys U.S. Treasury bonds, and the interest income generated will be directly allocated to the "School Foundation Fund" to support local public education.
Stablecoin: Who Will Benefit?
Wyoming's leap actually marks the entry of the stablecoin sector into the second half: moving from the "credit game" of private companies to the "public good" at the government level.
In the past, discussions about stablecoins revolved around the compliance risks of Tether or Circle; but in Wyoming's narrative, stablecoins are returning to their essence—a highly efficient, low-cost payment channel (settlement fees are usually less than $0.01), and beginning to possess public finance attributes.
However, this "digital highway" encounters invisible barriers in the real world.
In the Jackson Hole resort area of Wyoming, the monthly rent for an ordinary two-bedroom apartment has reached $4,000, 25% higher than in Los Angeles. Despite the local per capita GDP ranking among the highest in the U.S., about 10% of residents still face food shortages. For blue-collar workers who rush to catch commuter buses every morning and rely on two or three jobs to make ends meet, "stablecoins" feel more like a distant technological concept.
This disconnection is not accidental but is cleverly designed and maintained. A state finance official admitted to prospect.org that through land acquisition and planning thresholds, the landscape here has been shaped to "make poverty invisible."
Writer Annie Proulx once described the harshness of Wyoming's land, and today this harshness has been folded into two layers of impenetrable reality by technology and capital.
On one side is the tax-avoiding utopia built by the wealthy in the mountains; on the other side are ordinary Americans who support all of this but have nowhere to call home—their lives have been quietly folded in both reality and online narratives.
As I opened discussions about Wyoming on Reddit, complaints from locals were everywhere:
"Jackson is just a playground for super-rich people pretending to be cowboys on weekends; they list it as their primary residence to escape property taxes and income taxes."
"The people here are libertarians trying to create a 'libertarian paradise,' believing it will be a paradise for them (the working class). But in reality, it benefits the extremely wealthy, who treat it as their home (or second or third residence) because policies in this 'libertarian paradise,' such as less regulation and taxes, are advantageous to them."
In this kind of division, the state government is trying to build fiscal autonomy in the digital age on the ruins of the coal industry, using laws and stablecoins. Data shows that Wyoming has 348 LLCs for every thousand adults, surpassing Delaware to become the new institutional lowland in the U.S.
But can this influx of digital revenue into the "Cowboy State" truly stitch together the fractures of this land?
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