Only A Token Difference: Treating Cryptocurrencies Differently Makes No Sense

Cryptocurrencies like stablecoins have left many in the financial world, from major banks to customers, scratching their heads. It’s not just because few people understand how things like tokens work, but because regulations governing digital assets have further muddied the waters. And amid this confusion, consumers lose out.

There are traditional financial products or services with one set of rules. Then there’s an entirely different set of rules for functionally similar products and services on the blockchain. 

Take the Genius Act. Passed in July 2025, it barred stablecoin issuers from paying interest — unlike bank deposits, which do pay interest. Exchanges promptly began paying rewards to get around this rule, and those payments looked and felt like interest payments to customers.

Now the contentious Clarity Act is working its way through Congress. One reason for the contention is the debate over whether to fully extend a prohibition on these quasi-interest payments to exchanges and affiliates, in addition to stablecoin issuers.

Some crypto-supporters say restricting yield on stablecoin would kneecap a young market. Small bank advocates say the prohibition is necessary to prevent a deposit drain because they attract customers with interest rates higher than the big banks. They argue the current prohibition in the bill contains gaping loopholes that would still allow quasi-interest in practice.

The real problem is that the government has created two different regulatory frameworks for similar products. If a customer hands a financial firm his or her dollars, and the firm gives that customer a tradeable receipt for those dollars, it shouldn’t matter whether the transactions are happening on a bank ledger or the blockchain.

Regulation should focus on what a financial product does, the purpose it serves, the function it performs, not the technology used to build it. Neither Genius nor Clarity fully honor this principle, instead sorting similar financial instruments by their respective technologies, not their function.

The result is a hodgepodge of convoluted rules from an alphabet soup of government entities like the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Federal Reserve and more. The current fight over something as seemingly simple as stablecoins paying interest is a consequence of regulatory arbitrage.

That needs to be fixed for the sake of the finance industry broadly but also for customers specifically. This kind of artificial arbitrage opportunity only benefits industry insiders. Smaller market participants like community banks, crypto startups and individual depositors don’t have lobbying budgets to get advantageous classifications from regulators.