Three unrelated stories caught my attention this week

These stories are more connected than it seems on the surface.

Let’s dive in:

Chicago has chased a casino license for 30 years and it was never really about gaming. It was about pensions.

The casino was sold as a new revenue source that, once fully operational, could generate around $200M a year for our city, with gaming tax revenue specifically going toward Chicago’s police and fire pensions.

But let’s look at how the temporary casino in River North has performed:

The permanent casino could obviously perform very differently. But three years into the temporary operation, the pension revenue story has not come close to what Chicago originally envisioned.

And last week it got even more complicated.

Back in 2022, Chicago gave Bally’s protections against competing casino-style gambling inside Chicago. Late last year, the city council turned around and legalized video gambling terminals across Chicago, and Bally’s says that breaches its agreement with Chicago.

So one side of city government spent three decades trying to secure a dedicated revenue stream, and another legalized a product that could compete with it.

Revenue that was earmarked for police and fire pensions.

We spent 30 years building a tool to fix the problem. Now it’s underperforming and possibly headed for a legal fight with the city that built it.

Last week, Mayor Johnson signed an EO calling for a temporary moratorium on data center development in Chicago. The specific concerns he mentioned were around noise, energy, water use, and affordability.

Data centers have become a major political talking point. The concerns aren't nothing, but I've have not found a full pause to be the right answer.

A moratorium freezes today's assumptions right as the tech is changing rapidly, and it does it at the worst possible moment for Chicago’s balance sheet.

It's worth looking at this in the context of where our tax base sits.

Homeowners in Chicago recently saw the biggest property tax increase in 30 years, up 16.7%. And right in the middle of that, we're pausing a category of development that brings real dollars to the city.

About 60 data center sites across Cook County paid roughly $121M in property taxes in 2024. Not all of that goes to Chicago, but this is the kind of development that adds real money to our tax base.

Data center projects can also be required to make long-term financial commitments to ComEd so infrastructure costs tied to their demand aren't simply shifted onto other customers.

What gets lost in this debate is how much the technology has changed.

A few months ago, I visited the QTS Data Center Facility here in Chicago. They offer tours here.

QTS uses closed loop cooling, so they don't consume water to cool the servers once operational, and the entire facility uses about 600,000 gallons a year. I couldn't hear a thing while on site.

We should set better standards on noise, water, and power. Make sure the economics benefit Chicago. Instead of jumping to freeze.

A broad pause doesn't make the demand for compute disappear. It just moves the investment, the jobs, and the tax base somewhere else.

Both of the stories above are about revenue we already have and are losing. This one is about revenue we could have.

Earlier this year, Wyoming launched its own stablecoin called FRNT.

A stablecoin is a digital dollar. It's always worth $1, and every token is backed by real cash and short-term US T-bills that are held in reserve. You can send it instantly, anywhere, for pennies. Think of FRNT as a digital dollar that moves at the speed of a text.

When you buy $1 of the token, you hand Wyoming a dollar and get back a token worth a dollar. The state parks your dollar in Treasuries and keeps the interest. The state earns the yield on reserves backing tokens people choose to hold.

What’s really cool is how Wyoming is using the interest to pay for public schools after costs, and soon to be infrastructure in the state.

The difference with a state token is that the public keeps the profit instead of a private company.

Wyoming also doesn't need to raise billions in taxes to build the reserve. The reserve grow as people buy and hold the token. They hold the yield as long as those dollars remain in circulation.

The opportunity depends on adoption. But the math can get interesting quickly.

At a hypothetical 4% reserve yield:

Stablecoins are unique ways to bring real money to schools, infrastructure, tax relief, or the pension funds themselves. And the yield is only half of it.

Moving money on-chain also creates the potential to cut some of the interchange and processing fees attached to traditional payments. Plus being early would make Illinois the obvious home for the firms and talent building public digital money.

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