New York is running one of the country’s most unusual anti-poverty experiments, quietly dropping a $12,000 digital asset into the wallets of a small group of residents with no work requirements or spending rules. Instead of traditional benefits, these New Yorkers are being handed a year’s worth of unconditional cash in cryptocurrency and told to decide for themselves what to do with it. The pilot is small, but it is testing a big idea: whether a guaranteed, no-strings income, delivered in a stablecoin, can move people closer to financial stability in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
The program sits at the intersection of two hotly debated concepts, universal basic income and crypto finance, and it is unfolding not in a lab but in real apartments, on real phones, in real neighborhoods. I see it as a stress test of both ideas at once, with the stakes measured in rent payments, debt balances, and the daily tradeoffs that define life near the poverty line.
How the $12,000 crypto experiment actually works
At the core of the pilot is a simple structure: selected participants receive a total of $12,000 over roughly a year, paid out in a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency rather than in paper checks or direct bank deposits. Reporting on the initiative describes New York quietly handing out that $12,000 in crypto to residents as a kind of digital asset, dropped into real wallets that they can access on their phones once they are onboarded and verified as eligible recipients, with the funds framed explicitly as an income supplement rather than a loan or a repayable grant, according to coverage of how NYC is quietly handing out $12,000 in crypto. The money arrives in installments, not as a single lump sum, which is meant to mimic a paycheck and help people budget month to month while still giving them more flexibility than most public benefits allow.
The asset itself is not a volatile token like Bitcoin but USDC, a stablecoin designed to track the value of the United States dollar so that $1 in the token is intended to equal $1 in spending power. Earlier reporting notes that 160 New Yorkers aged 18 to 30 were chosen to receive $12,000 in USDC through Coinbase wallets, distributed as a basic income style stream that participants can convert into cash or use directly where merchants or apps accept it, according to a breakdown of What 160 New Yorkers receive in USDC. That design choice matters, because it tries to combine the predictability of a fixed income with the speed and low transaction costs of crypto rails, while insulating recipients from the wild price swings that have defined earlier digital asset experiments.
Who gets the money, and why they were picked
The pilot is not open to every resident of New York, and it is not a lottery for crypto enthusiasts. Instead, the selection criteria focus on low-income adults whose earnings fall near the poverty line, with an emphasis on younger residents who are often juggling unstable work, high rent, and limited savings. One detailed account explains that Coinbase will distribute $12,000 in USDC to 160 New York residents as part of a universal basic income program, with the funds supplied by the company and targeted at people whose financial profiles reflect the sharpest squeeze from the city’s cost of living, as described in coverage of how Coinbase will distribute $12,000 in USDC to 160 New York residents. The age band of 18 to 30 is deliberate, capturing a group that is often too old for youth-specific services but not yet established enough to have stable careers or housing…