For years, Bitcoin and other digital currencies were embraced by liberty-minded Americans — people who watched banks, governments, and woke corporations blacklist legal speech, freeze accounts, and punish disfavored industries. Crypto was supposed to be the escape hatch — property you control, transactions no one can censor, money that cannot be weaponized against you.
So it’s more than ironic — it’s infuriating — that part of the crypto world is now importing the very financial tyranny it was built to defeat.
On October 24, Americans for Tax Reform revealed that USDC — the stablecoin issued by Circle Internet Group — bans “weapons of any kind” in its terms of service, including firearms and ammunition. The same digital asset that markets itself as the currency of the future has decided that your Second Amendment rights are “prohibited transactions.”
And who runs Circle? A Democrat mega-donor.
So even in a system supposedly outside government control, partisan activism is still used to starve gun owners and the firearms industry. This is the same playbook we saw under Obama’s Operation Choke Point, where the DOJ and FDIC pressured banks to cut off lawful gun businesses. It’s the same logic behind the new Merchant Category Codes pushed by anti-gun banks to flag routine firearm sales as “suspicious.”
Different rails. Same attack.
This is why Donald Trump explicitly banned the creation of a Central Bank Digital Currency — because once money lives on rails built by people who hate you, they don’t need a law to take your rights. They only need a “terms of service.”
Circle’s move proves the point: before the government even issues a CBDC, the public-private surveillance model is already here. Crypto firms beholden to activist donors are choosing to discriminate against Constitutional activity — exactly like Visa, Mastercard, and big banks tried to before states began outlawing it.
Circle’s CEO recently told the World Economic Forum that money movement will soon be “instant, global, frictionless, and free.” But free for who? Free for ESG compliance? For ideologically approved purchases? For everything except the rights the Constitution explicitly protects?
Gun owners need to stop assuming “decentralized” equals “free.” When private actors adopt the censorship model of the state, there is no difference in outcome.
They don’t have to repeal the Second Amendment if they can simply make it impossible to spend.
