Why Banks Are Fighting So Hard Against Stablecoin Yield

 

There’s been a lot of language coming out of Washington lately about stablecoins.

 

Words like "prudence", "guardrails", and "financial stability" get thrown around whenever the CLARITY Act comes up. Coinbase recently pulled their support amid stablecoin issues in the same bill. But if you take a step back, it’s hard not to feel like something else is driving the intensity of the debate. Big banks don’t usually fight this hard over niche policy details unless there’s something material at stake.

 

Browsing the web, trying to find my next article for all of you, I came across a recent report from Standard Chartered’s digital assets research team, led by Geoff Kendrick, and it may just help to explain the fight a bit better. 

 

A Forecast Banks Can’t Ignore

Kendrick’s research doesn’t treat stablecoins as a crypto sideshow. It treats them as a potential alternative home for real money, the kind of money that currently sits in checking and savings accounts. He actually estimated that $500 billion will move from bank deposits to stablecoins by 2028. The idea isn’t that everyone suddenly abandons banks. It’s subtler than that. Even a gradual shift of deposits into stablecoins changes the math for banks in ways they really don’t like. Funding becomes  more expensive, liquidity assumptions get weaker, margins get squeezed. Those aren’t ideological concerns. Those are spreadsheet concerns. And spreadsheet concerns really make banks want to fight the issue.

 

But to understand the real threat to banks, you first have to better understand the business itself. Banks don’t just hold your money. They use it. Under fractional reserve banking, they keep only a slice and lend the rest out to earn interest for themselves. Sure, they'll keep that small portion of your deposit, but the majority gets reinvested through loans and other activities. That’s how they earn money and why they can afford to even pay any interest to you at all, even if it’s usually minimal.

 

This system works because deposits are assumed to be sticky. People don’t move their money often, and when they do, it usually stays within the banking system. Moving from one bank to another.

 

Stablecoins challenge that assumption. They make dollars mobile in a way they haven’t been before.

 

The Shift Is Coming

Right now, most stablecoins feel like tools, not destinations. They’re useful for transfers, trading, and crypto-native activity, but they’re not where most people park idle cash. Yield changes that. The moment a stablecoin starts paying something meaningfully better than a traditional savings account, the comparison becomes unavoidable. A digital dollar that moves instantly, works around the clock, and earns yield starts to look less like a crypto product and more like a better bank balance. That’s when stablecoins stop being adjacent to banking and start competing with it.

 

But, we're still talking mostly about crypto-native people. The real shift happens when stablecoins stop feeling like crypto at all, when they live inside apps people already trust and use every day. When you easily pay for your groceries on your phone without writing down that seed phrase for crypto that sits on a separate wallet that may or may not be linked to payments.

 

PayPal is already experimenting here. Their Paypal USD (PYUSD) exists inside a platform with hundreds of millions of users, and it already lets people move dollars instantly between PayPal and Venmo for free. That’s everyday payment stuff. It’s not a niche oracles or decentralized exchange use case. It’s peer to peer transfers in apps people use for rent, splitting bills, or sending money to family.

 

Cash App has also signaled support for stablecoin payments and more flexible money movement options, even if Bitcoin hasn’t become everyday cash yet. The point is simple: If stablecoins actually become integrated into the way regular people pay for things, save for short-term goals, and move money around, they stop being a "crypto thing” and become an alternative store of value and payment rail to banks.

 

That’s exactly the scenario a bank CFO would find unsettling.

 

Why the CLARITY Act Matters So Much

This is why the fight over stablecoin yield inside the CLARITY Act feels so charged. It’s not really about whether stablecoins should exist. That battle is already over. It’s about whether they’re allowed to become a true alternative to bank deposits. If yield stays restricted, stablecoins grow slowly and remain mostly transactional. If yield is allowed under a clear regulatory framework, they start to compete directly with how banks fund themselves. That’s a much bigger shift.

 

The Bottom Line

If you take Kendrick’s projections seriously, and I know that I do. I have been in this blockchain industry for a decade now. I have seen the shift from Silk Road and from not even being a second thought in Washington to being a presidential election policy issue and talked about at the highest levels of government, from sea to shining sea.

 

But pushback from banks does make sense. It’s not panic. It’s defense. Stablecoins that are easy to use, deeply integrated into everyday payment apps, how people spend their money, and capable of earning yield... threaten something fundamental. They threaten the quiet bargain where banks get cheap access to capital and customers accept low returns in exchange for convenience. Seen through that lens, the resistance to stablecoin yield isn’t surprising at all. It’s exactly what you’d expect when a new form of money starts to look a little too good at doing the job banks have always relied on to make money.

 

I know where I stand on the issue and I'm interested to know what you think. Do banks evolve, embrace stablecoins as inevitability or do they hold on to the old ways for dear life?