The CLARITY Act cleared the Senate Banking Committee 15-9 on May 14, 2026, but the biggest threat to its passage was never the crypto skeptics or the SEC holdouts. It was the American Bankers Association. The ABA spent April and May running an emergency lobbying campaign to close what it calls the “stablecoin yield loophole” in the bill, a provision that lets crypto exchanges pay activity-based rewards on stablecoin balances. The ABA’s own research estimates that yield-bearing stablecoins could grow the market from $300 billion to $2 trillion at the direct expense of bank deposits, reducing lending capacity by 20 percent or more. The fight is not about consumer protection or financial stability. It is about banks defending a profit model built on zero-yield checking accounts against a structurally superior alternative. This is the political fight nobody is properly explaining.
Summary
- The CLARITY Act’s stablecoin rewards provision has become the main flashpoint between the crypto industry and U.S. banking groups over fears of deposit migration from traditional banks.
- The American Bankers Association warned that yield-bearing stablecoins could expand the market to $2 trillion and reduce lending capacity across consumer, small business, and agricultural sectors.
- Crypto industry advocates argued that banks are defending low-yield deposit models as exchanges push for activity-based stablecoin rewards under the proposed legislation.
What the loophole actually is
The CLARITY Act, in its current form, contains a provision that has become the most contested single fight in crypto legislation in 2026. Most coverage refers to it vaguely as “stablecoin yield provisions” without explaining what is actually at stake. The specifics matter.
The 2025 GENIUS Act, which established federal stablecoin regulation, prohibits stablecoin issuers from paying interest or yield on payment stablecoins. The ban applies to the issuer (Circle for USDC, Tether for USDT, Ripple for RLUSD, Paxos for various tokens). The intent was to keep stablecoins working as payment instruments rather than competing with bank deposits.
The CLARITY Act contains language that, as currently drafted, lets crypto exchanges and digital asset service providers offer rewards on stablecoin balances held with them, even though the underlying issuer cannot pay yield directly. The Tillis-Alsobrooks compromise language, released in early May, refined the original draft. The compromise prohibits rewards that are “economically or functionally equivalent to the payment of interest or yield on an interest-bearing bank deposit.” But it allows rewards tied to “activity-based” participation in exchange membership programs, including rewards calculated by reference to balance, duration, and tenure.
That last clause is the loophole the banking industry is fighting. From the ABA’s perspective, an exchange offering a 4 percent reward on USDC balances held in a membership program is functionally identical to a bank paying 4 percent interest on a checking account. The fact that the reward is technically tied to “activity” rather than balance does not change the economic reality for the consumer. The depositor sees yield. The depositor moves money. The bank loses the deposit.
The banking industry is correct this is a loophole in the original GENIUS Act framework. Whether it should be closed is the political fight that has dragged CLARITY’s path through the Senate Banking Committee.
The deposit flight argument
The American Bankers Association’s central argument against the CLARITY language is the threat of deposit flight, and the numbers the ABA cites are striking enough to deserve serious examination.
On April 13, 2026, the ABA published its own commissioned study estimating that yield-bearing stablecoins could grow the global stablecoin market from approximately $300 billion today to $2 trillion within several years. The growth, the ABA argues, would come largely at the direct expense of traditional bank deposits, particularly checking accounts and money market accounts that currently pay little or no interest.
A coalition of banking trade groups, including the ABA, Bank Policy Institute, Independent Community Bankers of America, Consumer Bankers Association, and Mid-Size Bank Coalition of America, wrote to Senate Banking Committee leaders in early May, warning that “research indicates deposit flight driven by the widespread adoption of yield-bearing stablecoins could reduce consumer, small-business, and agricultural lending by one-fifth or more.”
This is the headline number that gets cited in coverage. A 20 percent reduction in lending capacity would be a material macroeconomic event. Banks fund commercial loans, mortgages, small business credit, and agricultural lending substantially from deposit bases. If deposits flee to yield-bearing stablecoins, the funding capacity for those loans shrinks proportionally. The banks’ argument is that this is not a marginal concern. It is a structural threat to the way credit flows through the US economy.
The argument has surface plausibility. The FDIC’s own analysis of the 2023 spring bank failures (Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, First Republic) found depositors with substantial uninsured funds were far more likely to run during stress events than insured retail depositors. The pattern suggests deposit stability is more fragile than banks publicly admit, particularly for uninsured balances and sophisticated depositors who actively manage cash positions.
What the deposit flight argument leaves out is the most important context. American checking accounts currently pay close to nothing. The national average interest rate on checking accounts is approximately 0.07 percent. On savings accounts, the average is approximately 0.43 percent. Both numbers have stayed near zero through the entire post-2008 era of low interest rates and have not risen materially even as the Federal Reserve raised the federal funds rate to over 5 percent in 2024.
The gap between what banks pay depositors and what banks earn on those same deposits has been one of the most profitable elements of the banking business for over a decade. Banks take in deposits at near-zero cost, lend them out at much higher rates, and capture the spread. The arrangement works for banks precisely because depositors have had no comparable alternative.
Yield-bearing stablecoins backed by US Treasuries can offer 3 to 5 percent returns to holders, depending on the underlying yield environment. The math is not subtle. A depositor with $10,000 in a zero-yield checking account is giving up roughly $400 per year in potential interest income. A depositor with $100,000 across various bank accounts is giving up roughly $4,000. The choice between zero yield in a bank account and 4 percent yield in a tokenized money market alternative is not a choice most rational consumers would make in favor of the bank, if the alternative existed at scale.
This is what the ABA’s deposit flight argument actually means in plain English. Banks are afraid the loophole will let consumers earn what their deposits should arguably have been earning all along. The “deposit flight” the ABA is warning about is, in part, consumers rationally responding to a better product.
What the banks are actually defending
The honest framing of the banking industry’s position requires understanding what banks are actually trying to protect.
The first thing banks are protecting is the zero-yield checking account business model. American banks currently hold approximately $17 trillion in customer deposits. A substantial portion of those deposits are in non-interest-bearing checking accounts or low-interest savings accounts. The interest rate banks pay on these deposits has been compressed near zero for over a decade. The income banks generate from lending these deposits at market rates is, in turn, one of the most reliable profit streams in the industry.
If stablecoins offering 4 to 5 percent yield became widely available and easy to access, the economic logic for keeping money in zero-yield bank accounts would weaken substantially. Banks would face a choice: raise deposit rates to compete (which would compress their net interest margins and reduce profitability), or lose deposits to stablecoin alternatives (which would force them to seek more expensive funding sources or reduce lending).
The second thing banks are protecting is the regulatory moat. Banks run under extensive regulatory requirements (capital adequacy, liquidity coverage, FDIC insurance assessments, Community Reinvestment Act obligations, Bank Secrecy Act compliance) stablecoin issuers do not face in the same form. The CLARITY Act would let stablecoin-related products compete with bank deposits without imposing equivalent regulatory burdens on the stablecoin side. Banks argue this creates an unlevel playing field. The argument has merit.
The third thing banks are protecting is the structural role of banks in credit creation. Under the current US banking system, deposits at commercial banks are the primary funding source for consumer and commercial lending. If deposits migrate to stablecoins, the funding model has to adjust. Banks would need to raise capital through wholesale funding (more expensive and less stable), or the lending capacity of the system would shrink, or some combination of both. The ABA’s argument this could reduce lending by 20 percent or more is contested but not implausible.
The fourth thing banks are protecting is their political position. Banking is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the United States, and the banking industry has spent decades building relationships with Congress, regulators, and the Federal Reserve. The political infrastructure banks have built gives them significant influence over financial legislation. Allowing stablecoins to compete with deposits would, over time, shift some of that political power to a new industry (the crypto industry) banks have historically opposed. Banks are not just defending their economic interests. They are defending the political ecosystem that protects those interests.
None of this is necessarily improper. Industries lobby for their interests. Banks have legitimate concerns about deposit funding, regulatory parity, and systemic stability. The argument is not that the banking industry’s position is illegitimate. The argument is the banking industry’s position is being framed as consumer protection and financial stability when it is, more straightforwardly, a defense of the existing profit model against a competitive threat.
The crypto industry’s response
The crypto industry’s pushback against the ABA campaign has been unusually pointed for what is typically a politically careful sector.
Paul Grewal, Chief Legal Officer at Coinbase, responded directly to the ABA’s lobbying campaign in early May. His argument was that banks have already had their preferred outcome in the GENIUS Act, which banned yield payments by stablecoin issuers themselves. Banks won “idle yield killed,” in Grewal’s framing, which was already a loss for consumers but a clear win for banks. The CLARITY Act compromise on activity-based rewards represents a further concession to banking industry concerns, and Grewal’s view is that the banks should “take yes for an answer.”
Cody Carbone, Chief Policy Officer at The Digital Chamber, was sharper. He criticized the banking industry for “waiting until the final days before the markup to raise objections.” The framing was that the banks had multiple opportunities to negotiate the language during the months of bipartisan negotiations and chose to wait until the eleventh hour to mount an emergency campaign. “The arrogance is astounding,” Carbone wrote in a public post.
The crypto industry’s substantive argument against the ABA is twofold. First, the deposit flight concern is overstated because banks can easily mitigate the issue by raising deposit rates to competitive levels. If banks paid 3 percent interest on checking accounts, the relative attractiveness of yield-bearing stablecoins would diminish considerably. The fact banks have chosen not to raise rates, even as the federal funds rate has stayed elevated for years, is a strategic choice rather than an unavoidable constraint.
Second, the lending capacity argument assumes banks are the only legitimate source of credit creation in the US economy. The reality is non-bank lending has grown substantially over the past decade. Private credit funds, fintech lenders, peer-to-peer platforms, and now potentially stablecoin-funded lending platforms all extend credit outside the traditional banking system. The deposit flight argument treats banks as irreplaceable. The economic reality is capital flows to where it can be deployed productively, and the structural role of banks has been gradually eroding for years.
The White House has taken a position broadly aligned with the crypto industry on this specific question. Patrick Witt, Executive Director of the President’s Council of Advisors on Digital Assets, publicly criticized the ABA’s late-stage lobbying effort, noting the bankers had been invited to the White House in February to discuss the compromise language and had not made themselves available at that time. The administration’s view is the Tillis-Alsobrooks compromise language is final, and the ABA’s continued lobbying is an attempt to relitigate a settled question.
Why the compromise still leaves space the banks oppose
The Tillis-Alsobrooks compromise language is the result of months of negotiation between crypto industry advocates and banking industry concerns. The language has been narrowed several times in response to bank lobbying. The current draft is, by ABA’s own admission, improved from earlier versions. But the banks are still fighting because the compromise still permits the specific mechanism that worries them most.
Under the current language, stablecoin issuers cannot pay yield directly. That part is unchanged from the GENIUS Act. Exchanges and crypto intermediaries cannot pay rewards “in a manner that is economically or functionally equivalent to the payment of interest or yield on an interest-bearing bank deposit.” This is the new restriction the compromise added.
But the language permits exchanges to pay rewards for “user participation in an exchange’s membership program,” with rewards potentially calculated by reference to duration, balance, and tenure. This is the loophole the banks want closed.
In practice, this means a crypto exchange could offer a membership program with tiered benefits. Higher membership tiers receive rewards based on the user’s overall engagement with the platform, including their stablecoin holdings. The rewards could be calculated as a percentage of the user’s average stablecoin balance over a given period, denominated in stablecoins or other tokens. The structure would be technically distinct from interest payments on a bank deposit, but the economic effect for the user would be similar.
The banking industry’s position is this structure is a designed workaround. The ABA’s letter to senators called the activity-based rewards provision “a significant loophole” that would let exchanges offer “interest-like incentives” through marginally different legal structures. If the goal of the GENIUS Act ban was to prevent stablecoins from competing with bank deposits, the ABA argues, the CLARITY language undermines that goal by allowing the same competition through a different mechanism.
The crypto industry’s position is activity-based rewards are not the same as yield payments and serve legitimate user engagement purposes exchanges should be allowed to design. The compromise language, on this view, is the correct balance: it bans the most direct form of stablecoin yield while preserving exchanges’ ability to compete on user experience.
The actual answer probably lies between the two positions. The activity-based rewards mechanism is, in practice, a partial substitute for direct yield. Whether it is enough of a substitute to trigger the deposit flight banks are warning about is an empirical question nobody can answer with certainty in advance. The compromise language is a bet that the answer is “no, or not by enough to cause systemic concern.” The banks’ continued lobbying is a bet that the answer is “yes, eventually, and the cost will be too high to undo.”
What this fight tells you about CLARITY’s real politics
The stablecoin yield fight reveals something about CLARITY’s broader political dynamics that most coverage misses.
The bill is being treated as a crypto industry victory in many headlines. The reality is that CLARITY is the product of extensive compromises with multiple stakeholder groups, each of which had to be partially accommodated for the bill to advance. The banking industry got the GENIUS Act ban on direct stablecoin yield. The crypto industry got the activity-based rewards carve-out. The progressive Democrats got partial ethics provisions that have not yet been finalized. The administration got the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act language. The CFTC got expanded jurisdiction over digital commodities. The SEC retained jurisdiction over digital securities.
The bill that emerged from this process is a negotiated settlement among multiple powerful interest groups, not a clean crypto industry win. The banks were not the only stakeholders who had to compromise. The crypto industry made substantial concessions, too. The bill that exists is the bill that could be negotiated, not the bill that any single party wanted.
This is normal for major financial legislation. The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 was a similar product of multi-stakeholder compromise. The Bank Secrecy Act amendments over the years have been similarly negotiated. The legislative process is, in many ways, a process of finding the minimum acceptable set of concessions that lets a bill move forward.
What is unusual about CLARITY is that the banking industry is openly trying to extract additional concessions during the floor vote stage, after the committee process has completed. This is a high-risk strategy for the banks. If they push too hard and Democrats walk away from the bipartisan compromise, CLARITY could stall on the Senate floor. If they push successfully and the language is further restricted, crypto industry support could weaken, and Republican senators could face pressure from their own constituents to vote against a bill that no longer accomplishes what was promised.
The banks are betting they have enough political leverage to extract further concessions without killing the bill. The crypto industry is betting the banks have already overplayed their hand. Both bets cannot be right.
The realistic outcome
Based on the current political dynamics, several outcomes are plausible for the stablecoin yield provisions in the final CLARITY Act.
The first possibility is that the compromise language survives substantially unchanged. The Tillis-Alsobrooks framework was the product of months of negotiation. Both senators have indicated they consider the language final. If the Senate floor vote happens in June or July 2026, as the White House targets, the compromise language could move through with only minor technical refinements. This is the outcome the crypto industry wants, and the banks are trying to prevent.
The second possibility is that the language gets tightened during floor amendments. Democrats negotiating for the bipartisan votes needed to overcome a filibuster could demand additional restrictions on activity-based rewards in exchange for their support. The ABA’s lobbying campaign is designed to create this dynamic. If banks can convince Democrats that the loophole is too large, the floor amendment process could narrow the rewards mechanism further.
The third possibility is that the language gets removed entirely during conference reconciliation with the House version. The House passed its version of crypto market structure legislation in 2024 (FIT21), and the final CLARITY Act will need to reconcile differences between the House and Senate versions. The conference committee process is opaque and often produces unexpected outcomes. The stablecoin yield provisions could be substantially modified during reconciliation.
The fourth possibility is that CLARITY stalls or fails entirely. If the stablecoin yield fight becomes too contentious, or if the broader ethics provisions and law enforcement issues cannot be resolved, the bill could miss its July 4 White House signing target and slip past the 2026 midterm elections. Senator Cynthia Lummis warned that failure to clear the committee before Memorial Day could push the next viable legislative window past November 2026. The bill cleared the committee on May 14, but the broader timeline pressure is real.
The fifth possibility, which gets less attention, is that the law passes substantially as drafted, but the agency-level rulemaking process narrows the rewards mechanism in implementation. CLARITY would direct the SEC and CFTC to develop joint rules on stablecoin-related products. The rulemaking process, which stretches into 2027 and 2028, would let regulators apply more restrictive interpretations than the statutory language strictly requires. This is the outcome banks may quietly prefer if they cannot win during the legislative phase.
What this tells you about banks and crypto going forward
The CLARITY Act stablecoin yield fight is, in many ways, a preview of the larger battle between banks and crypto that will play out over the rest of the decade.
The fundamental dynamic is that crypto-native infrastructure (stablecoins, decentralized exchanges, on-chain settlement) can offer customers economic terms that traditional banks cannot match while protecting their existing profit models. The crypto industry’s competitive advantage is not the underlying technology. It is the lack of legacy infrastructure costs and regulatory overhead that lets crypto firms pass through more value to end users.
For banks, the existential question is whether they can adapt their business models to compete with crypto-native alternatives or whether they need to keep regulatory moats that prevent direct competition. The CLARITY Act fight is one specific instance of this larger question. Future fights over central bank digital currencies, tokenized deposits, programmable money, and DeFi lending will all touch on the same fundamental issue.
The banking industry’s preferred strategy, visible in the ABA’s CLARITY campaign, is to use regulatory and political channels to constrain crypto competition rather than adapt to it. This strategy has worked historically. Banks have successfully constrained money market funds, peer-to-peer lending, and other deposit substitutes through regulatory and political pressure for decades. The question is whether the strategy keeps working as crypto becomes more established and politically powerful.
The crypto industry’s preferred strategy is to win the legislative fights that establish clear rules for digital assets and then compete on the merits in the resulting regulated market. The CLARITY Act, in its current form, would give crypto firms a clearer legal framework than they have ever operated under in the United States. If the bill passes substantially as drafted, the crypto industry would have a structural opportunity to compete with banks on more level terms than has ever existed before.
Whether the banks succeed in narrowing the CLARITY language further, or whether the crypto industry holds the line on the compromise, will be determined over the next two to three months. The vote count on the Senate floor will be the proximate indicator. The ABA’s lobbying intensity in the coming weeks will be the leading signal.
For readers tracking the fight, three things are worth watching. First, whether Senator Tillis or Senator Alsobrooks shows any signs of reopening the compromise language under pressure from banking constituents. Second, whether the ABA’s deposit flight studies gain traction with moderate Democrats who could shift the floor vote dynamics. Third, whether crypto industry advocacy groups (Blockchain Association, Digital Chamber, Coinbase’s policy team) successfully counter-mobilize their own grassroots networks in the way the banking industry has done.
The bottom line
The CLARITY Act is on a path to becoming law in 2026, but the path is narrower than the headlines suggest. The single biggest obstacle is not the SEC, the CFTC, the Democrats opposing the bill on ethics grounds, or the libertarian objections to government oversight of crypto. It is the American Bankers Association and the broader banking industry coalition fighting to close the stablecoin yield loophole the Tillis-Alsobrooks compromise created.
The fight is not about consumer protection or financial stability, despite how the ABA frames it. It is about banks defending a profit model built on zero-yield deposits against a structurally superior alternative. The deposit flight scenario the banks warn about is, in part, consumers rationally responding to a better product. The lending capacity reduction is a real concern, but the underlying issue is whether banks should be the only legitimate channel for credit creation in the US economy, which is a contestable proposition.
The CLARITY Act, in its current form, represents a negotiated compromise that gives banks substantial concessions (the GENIUS Act ban on direct stablecoin yield) while preserving some space for stablecoin-related products to compete (the activity-based rewards mechanism). The compromise is not perfect from either industry’s perspective. It is, by the standards of major financial legislation, a reasonable balance.
What happens next will be determined by which side overplays its hand. If the banks push for further restrictions and Democrats walk away from the bipartisan compromise, CLARITY could stall on the Senate floor and miss its 2026 window entirely. If the crypto industry holds the line and the bill passes substantially as drafted, banks will face a structural competitive threat they have not faced in decades.
Both outcomes are plausible. Neither is guaranteed.
For crypto.news readers, the practical lesson is to watch the floor vote dynamics, the conference reconciliation process, and the agency rulemaking that will follow passage. The legislative outcome will set the framework. The administrative implementation will determine how much of that framework actually works in practice. Both phases will be shaped by ongoing pressure from the banking industry that is unlikely to stop just because the bill becomes law.
The banks are not trying to kill CLARITY because they oppose crypto regulation. They are trying to kill the specific version of CLARITY that lets stablecoins compete with bank deposits on terms banks cannot match without raising their own deposit rates. The fight is, in its essentials, about who gets to capture the spread between zero-yield deposits and Treasury-backed yields.
The answer to that question will shape American banking for the next decade.
This article is for informational purposes and does not constitute legal, financial, or investment advice. Legislative outcomes and policy debates evolve quickly; the analysis described reflects reporting available as of late May 2026. Always do your own research and consult appropriate counsel for specific regulatory matters.
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