CLARITY stalls at 25% odds while banks and crypto fight over who pays stablecoin holders

The mechanism worth understanding here is the coupling. The GENIUS Act, passed last year, bars direct interest payments to stablecoin customers but leaves room for third parties to reward clients who hold coins such as USDC ^[4]. That is a stablecoin question. CLARITY is a market-structure bill, and by the account of the Fortune op-ed it was not meant to address stablecoins at all ^[5]. So the item holding up token market structure sits in a different statute, which means no clean vote on CLARITY disposes of it. Either the deposit-interest gap gets closed somewhere, or the market-structure text keeps carrying a fight that does not belong to it.

The arithmetic in the piece is where the two sides stop meeting. Net interest income across the industry ran to $740 billion last year on government data, with J.P. Morgan alone at close to $100 billion ^[7][9]. One bank is therefore roughly 13 percent of the whole pool that third-party stablecoin rewards are said to threaten ^[2]. The trade-group framing quoted in the op-ed is that competition for deposits may erode the industry's ability to create credit, hurting farmers and small businesses ^[13]. The same piece notes banks account for only 20 percent of US credit creation, and that the largest banks lend out half of what they take in deposits ^[11]. On those figures, four fifths of credit creation happens outside the perimeter the argument is defending ^[3].

Read this source for what it is: a single opinion column, openly hostile to the bank lobby, characterising both sides of a dispute. It supplies no bank-side estimate of expected deposit outflow from third-party rewards. It does assert that no credible academic argument exists that even direct payments to holders would drain deposits ^[14], and it points at money market funds, where trillions flowed in over the following decades while bank deposits kept rising ^[15]. That is an analogy, not a model, and an analogy is what the other side is being answered with.

The number operators should actually plan against is the Polymarket line: 25 percent for passage this year ^[2], which is three to one against ^[1]. That is a price, not a whip count, and it can move on one committee calendar. But a firm choosing between building for a statutory regime and building for the regulators it already has now has a market quote telling it the statute is the minority case. The same column reports bank profitability up, regulatory burden down, and the KBW Bank Index ahead of the NASDAQ over the past year ^[12], which is the awkward backdrop to a protection argument. Being right about the profits does not win the vote.