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University of Wyoming and state agencies explore accepting Frontier stable token for payments
Summary
University officials and commission staff discussed pilots to accept the Frontier token for tuition and athletics, identified statutory and procurement barriers, and proposed a template implementation to avoid duplicative procurements for local governments.
The Select Committee on Blockchain heard proposals July 14 about agency and university pilots to accept the Frontier stable token for payments. Aaron Courtney, Associate Vice President for Budget and Institutional Planning at the University of Wyoming, told the committee the university has held meetings with commission staff and is exploring student payments and athletics as pilot areas. Courtney said the university’s payment processor does not currently accept stablecoin, but university partners and vendors exist that do and that about $12 million per year in student fees are paid by credit card.
Courtney and committee members discussed statutory constraints. Apollo noted that some statutes enumerate payment forms (checks, warrants) or define "lawful money" and do not currently include virtual currency, so agencies such as the unclaimed property division may need statutory changes to accept tokenized payments. Apollo said the commission had run AI‑assisted queries of Wyoming statute to identify friction points and recommended a phased, template approach so smaller counties and agencies can plug into a state infrastructure rather than running separate procurements.
Why it matters: the university pilot would test retail user experience, vendor APIs and statutory fixes; committee members flagged potential savings from lower fees versus credit cards and asked the commission to coordinate with existing SPDI and payments vendors. Both sides agreed on the value of a state‑level template to reduce procurement burden on local offices.
Next steps: the committee encouraged the commission, university and local treasurers to explore API integrations, statutory clarifications, and a small working group of early adopters to shape implementation. No formal action was taken during the meeting.
