#稳定币去利息化博弈升温 The Endgame of Yield-Generating Stablecoins: Wall Street’s Deposit Defense and the CB’s Card Reveal

The US stock market on March 24, 2026, delivered a harsh lesson to all believers immersed in the illusion of the “Crypto Compliance Army.” Just hours after the opening, the stock price of stablecoin giant Circle plummeted by 18%, like a critically ill patient disconnected from oxygen, ruthlessly breaking through its proud 21-day moving average. This star company, which had surged from $60 to over 170% in February, reaching a high of $130, was instantly brought back to its original form. Meanwhile, its interest community and Wall Street crypto spokesperson Cb also suffered heavy losses, with the stock evaporating over 9% in a single day. Don’t rush to blame macroeconomic factors—Bitcoin was still near $70,000 at the time. This was not a natural market correction but a “precise targeted explosion” orchestrated behind closed doors by traditional Wall Street banking interests on Capitol Hill.

Senators Thom Tillis and Angela Alsobrooks promoted the so-called “Digital Asset Market Clarity Act” (CLARITY Act) latest compromise draft, which precisely cut off the vital artery of stablecoin issuance—yields. When lawmakers tried to lock down USDC’s underlying business logic with a phrase like “prohibiting any yield distribution economically equivalent to interest,” Cb CEO Brian Armstrong even withdrew support for the entire bill. This is no longer a technical regulatory discussion; it’s a final battle over the pricing power of trillions in cheap deposits.

Pulling off the “bridge commission” cover-up: the original sin of 3.5% annualized yield

To understand the bloody flesh and bones in this capital meat grinder, you must first grasp how stablecoins make money. Don’t be fooled by high-end terms like blockchain and Web3—beneath the surface, the core logic of yield-generating stablecoins is brutally simple: it’s essentially a “high-interest deposit-taking” machine with no credit risk. Previously, the crypto industry had already tasted this bitter pill. The passed “GENIUS Act” last year explicitly banned stablecoin issuers from paying yields directly to users holding deposited funds. But how could these Wall Street and Silicon Valley veterans be stifled so easily?

Since direct payments are forbidden, they resort to “piercing through.” Circle converts the USD backing USDC into real dollars, then uses that to buy risk-free US Treasuries and reverse repurchase agreements. In the Fed’s high-interest rate cycle, these underlying assets earn substantial interest just by lying idle. After receiving this money, Circle takes a cut and distributes the remaining profit to its distribution partners, Cb, under the guise of “revenue sharing.” Then, Cb packages this as “platform rewards,” paying USDC-holding users an annualized yield of up to 3.5%. This “bridge commission” scheme perfectly circumvents the literal restrictions of the GENIUS Act, growing a money tree in the cracks of compliance. According to analyst Dan Dolev, interest income related to USDC now accounts for about 20% of Cb’s total revenue. This is not only a profit cow on Coinb’s financial statements but also the core moat that allows stablecoins to evolve from “simple payment tools” into “savings substitutes.”

But under the microscope of regulation, this cleverness backfires. When you deposit money somewhere and watch the account balance grow daily without doing anything, you call that an “ecosystem reward”? Don’t be ridiculous. In the eyes of any regulatory authority, if it sounds like a duck, walks like a duck, it’s a bank deposit earning interest. The fatal blow of the latest CLARITY draft is that it no longer relies on wordplay but directly penetrates to the underlying economic substance. Any reward that is paid based on “static balances” and is economically equivalent to deposit interest is cut off entirely. It’s like confiscating the chips exchange machines at a casino, draining the liquidity pools of passive funds.

Traditional banks’ survival anxiety: who touched my cheap liabilities

If you think this is just the US Congress protecting investors from crypto risks, you’re too naive. Politics has always been an extension of interests. The real threat to stablecoins comes from the American Bankers Association (ABA). In this game, traditional banks may look ugly, but their fears are very real. Just check the interest rates on your community bank’s savings accounts—0.01% annual yield. That’s not interest; that’s charity. The reason traditional banks can sit back and profit is due to this extreme asymmetry in interest margins. They attract deposits at near-zero cost and then lend out at over 7% interest on business loans and mortgages. This is the vampire model of modern banking.

Now, a strange creature called USDC suddenly appears. Users only need to download an app, convert their money into a string of code, with no lock-up periods, and can transfer or cash out at any time—all while earning a 3.5% annual yield. If this loophole is fully opened, Silicon Valley engineers, Wall Street traders, and even ordinary middle-class people will no longer keep surplus funds in traditional bank checking accounts. Money has gravity—it always flows toward higher yields and lower friction costs. As massive deposits leave the traditional banking system, flow into stablecoin issuers’ pockets, then are directly bought into government bonds, the assets and liabilities of traditional banks will face a catastrophic shrinkage.

Without cheap deposits, what will they lend? How will they sustain community and real economy operations? This is the core logic behind the banking industry’s frantic lobbying on Capitol Hill—allowing stablecoins to pay interest is like digging up the graves of thousands of small and medium banks across America. So, in the closed-door review of the CLARITY bill, we see an absurd “compromise” play. Lawmakers played a word game: you can pay rewards for “specific activities” (like trading, loyalty programs, promotional subscriptions), but absolutely cannot pay based on “account balances.” This is a blatant mockery of financial efficiency.

Money itself has time value—this is basic knowledge in finance. But now, to protect the fragile moat of traditional banks, laws require stablecoin users to click around on screens and perform meaningless “interactions” to earn their own money’s time value. This legislative misfit is not only a regression in regulation but also a blatant trampling of trust in the underlying DeFi market.

Tether’s backstab and the curse of compliance

While Circle is being grilled over compliance issues, its rival Tether (issuer of USDT) is doing what? They’re watching the joke—and dressed in suits. According to the latest news, Tether has just announced a high-profile engagement of one of the “Big Four” accounting firms to conduct a comprehensive, long-term committed independent audit of its USDT reserves. The timing is deadly. For a long time, Circle’s main marketing pitch has been “transparency, compliance, US regulation,” while Tether has maintained a rough-and-ready offshore vibe. Institutional investors tolerate USDC’s slightly worse liquidity because they want peace of mind that it won’t suddenly blow up.

But now, the tide is turning. Fundstrat’s digital assets head Sean Farrell pointed out sharply that if Tether truly secures the Big Four’s audit endorsement, it will greatly improve USDT’s trust among US investors and could even accelerate its adoption in the onshore market. On one side, offshore wildcards are dressing up in suits; on the other, domestic compliant players are being battered by their own regulators. Circle’s market share is about 30%, and it faces a future market expected to expand tenfold over the next four years. But if it loses its passive yield advantage and Tether, after whitewashing, eats away at its “safety and compliance” moat, Circle’s profit margins will be brutally squeezed. This is a tragic reflection of the crypto industry: the curse of compliance. The more actively you embrace regulation, make your balance sheet transparent, and disclose profit-sharing models, the more likely you are to become a target for legislators to appease traditional financial interests.

Compass Point analyst Ed Engel set a neutral target price of $79 for Circle—half of the $130 peak before the crash. This brutal valuation essentially reflects Wall Street’s cold accounting for stablecoins that have “lost the yield imagination.”

The political ATM of 2026: Coinb’s all-or-nothing

If you think this is just a simple battle over the distribution of the financial cake, you’re underestimating Washington’s politicians. In the sensitive 2026 midterm elections and political reshuffle, the CLARITY Act has long become a patchwork of political chips. Why is the bill so delayed? Besides the yield dispute, the more surreal reason is a clause secretly inserted by the Democrats: banning current senior government officials and their families from profiting from crypto investments. Anyone with a bit of US political insight knows this clause is tailor-made for Trump, who promotes a “crypto president” persona. The Republicans obviously won’t let such targeted political poison pass, so both sides stare at each other across Capitol Hill, deadlocked, trapping the future of the entire crypto market in a bottleneck.

Faced with this rogue behavior of turning the entire industry into a political ATM, Coinb chose to flip the table. As America’s largest crypto exchange, Brian Armstrong knows clearly that accepting this mutilated draft would cause the stablecoin ecosystem to collapse entirely. Without yields, stablecoins are just digital IOUs wrapped in blockchain. Funds won’t be deposited; they’ll only serve as transit points for trading Bitcoin. This would directly destroy Coinb’s most important growth engine over the next decade. Time is running out. If the CLARITY bill cannot pass the upcoming Senate Banking Committee hearing, the legislative window will close as the November midterms approach. If the House’s control shifts next year or a more hostile SEC chair takes over, the entire Web3 industry will face years of regulatory vacuum.

Current SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins warned at the New York Digital Asset Summit that only Congress can provide future-proof clarity, and he is extremely reluctant to see future regulators revert to hostile crackdowns.

But the reality is, if compromise means emasculation, it’s better to stay in the dark jungle law.
The yield war of stablecoins, on the surface, is a dispute over CLARITY Act provisions, but at its core, it’s a life-and-death struggle over the liquidity distribution of the US dollar. Wall Street giants have proven with action that they can tolerate blockchain as a trading technology but will never allow it to shake the liability side of traditional banking as a savings substitute.
In this final showdown, those deprived of the 3.5% annual yield are not only retail holders but also the entire DeFi narrative attempting to overthrow the traditional deposit and lending model. There are no winners in this brutal fight—only a market torn apart by interests and code in chaos.