Rob Nichols says the American Bankers Association wants to strengthen the Clarity Act, not kill it, and that the fix is a handful of word changes in a 600-page bill. I take him at his word on intent. But the changes are not small, and the premise behind them has been tested against seven years of data and did not survive.
The ABA’s case rests on a prediction: let platforms pay stablecoin rewards and deposits will drain out of community banks, taking local lending with them. That has been testable for years, because current law already permits these rewards, and Coinbase has paid them on USDC for more than four years. If the mechanism worked as the ABA describes, the damage would be visible.
It isn’t. Community bank deposits grew 26 percent, roughly $482 billion, from June 2019 through March 2026, straight through the entire rise of stablecoins and stablecoin rewards.
Faryar Shirzad is chief policy officer at Coinbase.
The empirical evidence points one direction
Empirical studies from Charles River Associates and the Council of Economic Advisors also show no significant relationship between stablecoins and deposits. Rob calls the absence of deposit flight since GENIUS “irrelevant” because regulators haven’t finished their rules. That asks Congress to legislate against a future harm no one can measure while ignoring the record we’ve already spent years with. Money market funds, Treasury bills, and brokered CDs have out-yielded checking accounts for years without emptying them.
Banks understand exactly what rewards do
Consumers earned nearly $50 billion in credit card rewards last year, and more than 90 percent of general-purpose card spending runs on cards that offer them. The banking industry built that. Rewards are how you get consumers to adopt a product and then use it.
