United States

History

The United States began with wampum and tobacco as colonial commodity money, Massachusetts Bay's first colonial paper bills in 1690, and the Continental currency whose collapse gave rise to the phrase 'not worth a continental.' The Coinage Act of 1792 established the US dollar, followed by the Free Banking era, Civil War greenbacks, the Confederate States dollar, the gold standard, the founding of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the 1933 gold confiscation, the Bretton Woods system, the 1971 Nixon Shock, and today's digital payments era with FedNow and a policy banning CBDCs alongside the 2025 GENIUS Act regulating stablecoins.