The banks killed Clarity to stop a product the US Treasury pays for.
$USDC rewards are T-bill interest.
Circle holds the reserves in Treasuries, Coinbase keeps the reserve income on every dollar on its platform and half of the rest, and passes part of it to you.
- Tuesday four Republicans voted no, Hawley said small banks are losing deposits.
- Friday Coinbase launched the same rewards in Brazil.
- The Senate killed the bill and never touched the product, because it isn't Coinbase's product. It's the Treasury's coupon with a Coinbase logo.
The executive branch has a deficit to fund and a 10-year at 5.04%, highest since 2007.
A yield-bearing stablecoin is its marginal buyer of bills, Bessent calls it $2t of demand.
So the branch that writes the rules needs the yield uncapped, and Armstrong told Melker the agency rules will be more permissive than the bill.
The Fed blocked this exact product in 2018, The Narrow Bank, full reserves, pass-through interest, because at 2% it could afford to protect banks. At 5% it can't.
✅
$USDC yield stays uncapped while the 10-year stays high. Every hike raises the rewards budget
✅ The only thing that can cap it is a Democratic bill in 2027, not the SEC or CFTC
✅ The banks won a vote in the branch that doesn't write rules and lost in the one that does.
Crypto is on the rise and it’s profitable for us to farm it during this period of lingering uncertainty.
Here we go again! The WSJ is working on a story blaming Coinbase and me personally for the CLARITY Act not passing.
The Journal has repeatedly been hostile to CLARITY in its reporting, regurgitating bank lobby talking points, while I’ve spent years pushing for crypto legislation, but that’s not stopping them from trying to reverse the blame.
The boring TLDR: in January I opposed a draft of the bill going into a committee vote, because it needed a lot of work on DeFi, tokenization, CFTC authority, and stablecoin rewards. At the time, the bill had major issues that would have harmed crypto. Support was fractured, and it wasn’t passable. We worked with a number of parties who improved the bill and made it passable. All four of the items I called out were fixed in the draft that then went through the committee about four months later. I'm proud to have done it, and would do it again, because it helped create a better bill. One step of many along the way.
The final draft of CLARITY that went to the Senate was great, and I strongly supported it. I'll continue showing up for our customers and pushing for clear rules that treat crypto fairly, even if those who feel threatened by crypto try to plant false stories. It's a shame that the WSJ takes direction from bank lobbyists instead of reporting the truth, but luckily, people are smart enough to see through it these days, and it backfires on them every time.