The US Division of Housing and City Growth is reportedly seeking to experiment with utilizing blockchain and a stablecoin for a few of its features.
The division, whose duties embody overseeing social housing, has to date mentioned the potential for utilizing blockchain to observe grants, ProPublica reported on March 7, citing a gathering recording, paperwork and three officers accustomed to the matter.
Additionally mentioned was the concept of experimenting with paying a HUD grantee utilizing a stablecoin, which may first be examined in one of many division’s places of work earlier than being utilized broadly throughout different places of work.
HUD, headed by Trump choose Scott Turner, has additionally been wrapped up in Musk’s cost-cutting blitz. Supply: Secretary Turner Press Workplace
Two officers informed ProPublica they consider the HUD blockchain experiment might be a trial run for using crypto and blockchain throughout the federal authorities.
A gathering final month mentioned a challenge the place the Group Planning and Growth workplace, which oversees billions of {dollars} in grants that help inexpensive housing and homeless shelters, would monitor funds to at least one grantee on the blockchain.
One assembly attendee later wrote the necessity for the challenge was “not nicely articulated,” and a HUD official slammed the plan in a workers memo as “harmful and inefficient.” They added it was pointless and sophisticated and that stablecoin funds would add volatility.
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At a follow-up assembly, HUD staffers had a extra blended evaluation, with some saying the blockchain challenge may contain paying grantees with crypto and one official saying it might be accomplished with “a secure foreign money.” One other finance official mentioned blockchain can be carried out throughout the company, beginning within the CPD.
Nevertheless, a HUD spokesperson informed ProPublica that “the division has no plans for blockchain or stablecoin. Training shouldn’t be implementation.”
President Donald Trump has intently embraced the crypto trade, and the reported HUD experiment mimics the concepts of his cost-cutting czar Elon Musk, who helps utilizing blockchain in a bid to curb federal spending.
In the meantime, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent mentioned on the White Home Crypto Summit on March 7 that the federal government would ”put quite a lot of thought into the stablecoin regime” in a bid to “hold the US [dollar] the dominant reserve foreign money on the planet.”
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