#创作者冲榜 SEC Issued a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card, But Bitcoin Is Playing Dead: Wall Street and Crypto Upstarts' "Interest-Bearing Rights" Meat Grinder
The retail investors in the crypto space must be feeling absolutely surreal these past few days. In mid-March 2026, the U.S. SEC and CFTC rarely aligned, rolling out that "token classification guidance" the entire industry had been begging for over eight years. New SEC Chair Paul Atkins made sweeping strokes, dividing crypto assets into five major categories, and brazenly declared to the world: the vast majority of cryptocurrencies aren't securities at all. This is equivalent to issuing a get-out-of-jail-free card to Web3 practitioners who had been pinned down and violently rubbed against the ground by Gary Gensler over the past few years.
According to the script, Bitcoin should have performed a spectacular rally on the spot, soaring straight to $100,000. Reality, however, is that Bitcoin sits before the $75,000 resistance level like an old man with an enlarged prostate—not only showing no signs of movement, but even breaking through the $70,000 support level in the process.
The regulatory "five-fold classification" is merely a paper towel; the real prey is on the back of the ledger
Don't get excited about the SEC's five categories (digital commodities, digital collectibles, digital utilities, stablecoins, digital securities). This is at most a tissue for wiping up the vomit left behind by violent enforcement in the previous era, now that the regulatory apparatus has changed leadership. The top predators of Wall Street and the tech-savvy elites of Silicon Valley don't actually care whether Dogecoin counts as a commodity or as thin air. In their eyes, there's only one real prey that can print money: the underlying liquidity of stablecoins.
The logic of the market voting with its feet is cold and crystal clear. The reduction in compliance costs can indeed help exchanges pay fewer fines, but it can't conjure profits out of thin air.
When the Federal Reserve's interest rate expectations are firmly stuck in the 3.5% to 3.75% range, when the specter of the Iran war sends crude oil prices soaring, smart money has already seen through the bottom cards of this policy show. Big capital is frantically withdrawing from high-risk assets like Bitcoin and pouring into digital dollars instead. Because in a period when rate cuts have been indefinitely delayed, whoever controls the digital distribution rights of the dollar controls the tax collection rights of the new financial empire.
This is why the Clarity Act—the legislation that truly determines the underlying architecture of the crypto market—still lies like a corpse in the holding pen of the Senate Banking Committee. Senator Cynthia Lummis claimed there could be progress by late April next year, but politician's soothing words are dripping with hypocrisy down to the punctuation marks.
The hold-up on the bill has nothing to do with partisan disagreements on the technical side. Rather, it's because century-old Wall Street banks and Cb-type crypto upstarts are engaged in a knife-edge white-knuckle fight in the backrooms of Capitol Hill over "stablecoin interest-bearing rights."
"Interest Payments" Are the Original Sin: Where Old-Guard Wall Street and Web3 Gamblers Meet in the Meat Grinder
Let's completely gut the stablecoin business model. You hand over real hard-earned U.S. dollars to a stablecoin issuer, and they give you a string of code. Then they turn around, take your money and buy U.S. Treasury bonds, and safely pocket that 3% to 4% risk-free return. This is an almost cost-free, guaranteed-profit racket. Cb alone, leveraging this "interest moat," pockets billions of dollars annually just lying in bed. Now, scale this logic across the entire U.S. financial market.
Why do banks wield enormous power on Wall Street? Because they've got depositors' interest spreads locked down. If the Clarity Act grants stablecoin issuers legal status and allows them to directly pay interest to retail holders of stablecoins (the so-called Rewards Loophole), what do you think happens?
This means the death knell of traditional banking. Why would an ordinary person keep their money in JPMorgan Chase's demand deposit account with an annual yield of less than 1%? They could just easily convert all their money into compliant stablecoins, store them in their mobile wallet, enjoy instant cross-border transfers, and watch a 4% annual interest accrue to their account daily. Once this Pandora's box is opened, the savings pools of traditional banks will be completely drained within months. That's why the banking system is panicking.
Banking industry lobbying groups have thrown serious money at Capitol Hill to hold a hard line: stablecoins absolutely cannot pay interest, unless the issuer applies to become a fully regulated traditional bank. It's like when the automobile industry was born and the carriage drivers' association vehemently demanded that all cars must be equipped with a horse to be allowed on the road. This isn't about exploring financial innovation; it's about defending class interests.
What Cb and others face is a compliance stalemate worth billions of dollars: either hand over the interest distribution rights or never expect to obtain legal status. As long as this meat grinder of interests doesn't stop running, Bitcoin, no matter how deflationary it becomes, can only wallow in the $70,000 muck.
Traditional Finance's "If You Can't Beat Them, Buy Them": Mastercard Throws Down $1.8 Billion in a Closed-Loop Strategic Move
While politicians and crypto fundamentalists are still fighting over the naming rights to interest distribution, the real old money has already started buying the dip at the physical infrastructure level. Look at what Mastercard just did. $1.8 billion, directly acquiring BVNK, the UK stablecoin infrastructure company. This deal even surpassed the epic $1.1 billion that Stripe paid to acquire Bridge. There's a very interesting detail: BVNK had almost been swallowed up by Cb at a $2 billion price tag. Why did that deal fall through? Why did Mastercard ultimately become the buyer?
Because for crypto enterprises, buying infrastructure is about growing the ecosystem; but for payment giants like Mastercard, buying infrastructure is about buying survival. Mastercard knows better than anyone that the global card network it has operated for fifty years is essentially just an information transmission system. Transaction authorization needs to complete in milliseconds, but fund settlement crawls along on the slow track of traditional banking for days. But enterprises like BVNK—over the past year, they've processed $30 billion in stablecoin payments across 130+ countries. This is a dimension-breaking attack. Once B2B cross-border payments start getting used to the millisecond settlement and ultra-low friction of USDC and USDT, traditional remittance channels become rusted artifacts.
Wall Street's explicit strategy is now completely exposed. They don't want to waste time understanding the hacker spirit of blockchain anymore. They've chosen to directly buy up the tollbooths on the highway. Regulatory agencies are up front using the compliance stick to herd crypto barbarians into the enclosure, while traditional giants in the back use checkbooks to monopolize all the core infrastructure. No matter how the Clarity Act ultimately rules on who gets the interest, as long as funds keep flowing through the digital dollar pipeline, Mastercard and its ilk will continue drawing off their cut safely and soundly. This $1.8 billion acquisition doesn't just buy the technological future; it buys off the dreams of crypto punks trying to upend traditional finance.
The End Game Before the Rate Cut: Not Giving Money to Retail Is the Only Consensus Among the Elites
Once you see through this game, you'll understand why the crypto market has reacted so coldly after the SEC's classification guidelines came out. Because the entire industry has transitioned from the wild west era of "fighting for survival" into an oligarchy era of "dividing the pie." Balance sheets don't lie. Venus Protocol crashed over a vulnerability, crypto platforms cut 12% of their staff introducing AI for cost reduction and efficiency gains, and Bitcoin's original believers took the opportunity to dump billions in value after the positive news landed.
When the scythe of macroeconomic contraction hangs high because inflation won't come down, no institution is willing to pay for ethereal decentralization beliefs. What they want is real, tangible U.S. dollar cash flows. The Clarity Act will definitely eventually pass, but absolutely not in a way that benefits retail traders. After several rounds of mutual spit-swapping and backroom dealings between Wall Street banking tycoons and top-tier Web3 exchanges, they will inevitably reach a dirty yet perfect compromise: underlying protocols must be compliant, interest earnings will be legitimately skimmed off layer by layer by institutions, and as the price, retail traders will get an incredibly smooth, fully integrated-into-daily-life stablecoin payment experience.
In this endgame battle over digital dollar liquidity, the SEC handles issuing licenses, Congress handles distributing profits, and traditional payment giants handle laying the pipes. As for you and me, who contributed all the real capital to this closed loop, our only role is to continue serving as a quiet-burning battery in this brand-new digital financial matrix, repackaged as a Web3 revolution.
