Rich by Coin

The crypto industry’s top policy priority, the Senate’s Clarity Act, is growing more urgent by the day as time runs thin on negotiations. A Senate time crunch means every day increases pressure on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, and banker opponents of the bill haven’t budged. The OCC’s proposed GENIUS Act rule, which suggests that stablecoin reward structures may violate the act’s intent, has injected fresh uncertainty into talks. Inaction could cost the crypto side more heavily than the banking side, because the Clarity Act is its top priority.

If you break down what’s standing in the way of advancing the crypto sector’s top goal in Washington — Clarity Act legislation — the part of the debate that the industry can control is narrow: stablecoin rewards. Companies such as Coinbase have been vigorously defending that business turf, wanting to keep giving customers incentives for engaging with stablecoins on their platforms. But Wall Street banking lobbyists rolled in and made an argument that getting yield on stablecoin accounts is a lot like getting interest on savings accounts, and if the former kills the latter, the death of the deposit business means the strangulation of bank lending. That argument stuck with enough lawmakers on both sides of the aisle that it stopped the Senate’s Digital Asset Market Clarity Act in its tracks.

Until now, the crypto side has argued that it has the upper hand, because the crypto bill that already passed into law — the GENIUS Act — seemed to allow third-party platforms such as Coinbase to offer rewards tied to other issuers’ tokens, such as Circle’s. However, a newly proposed rule from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency implementing GENIUS concluded that such relationships may violate the intent of the law. The last time the crypto and banking negotiators sat down with White House officials, Trump’s crypto advisers seemed to favor a compromise that would allow some rewards — not for merely holding stablecoins, but for actually using them for transactions and to support crypto infrastructure. Crypto insiders felt confident in their leverage, with GENIUS behind them and the White House favoring certain rewards.