🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Coinbase has millions riding on stablecoin language in the bill

• Coinbase, a large US crypto exchange, brought in US$355 million from stablecoin activity in Q3 2025. That was nearly 20% of total revenue 1.
• Much of that money comes from stablecoin deals and user reward programs that help bring people in. Coinbase spent US$1.07 million on lobbying in Q1 2026 and briefly pulled support for the CLARITY Act draft in January over the bill’s language on stablecoin rewards 2.
• Banks warn that stablecoins could pull money out of deposits. The Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee, a government-linked advisory group on federal debt markets, estimated that US$6.6 trillion could shift from bank deposits to stablecoins, weakening a source of loan funding 3.

Stablecoin rules could foreshadow more clashes between tech and finance

• Lawmakers now have to sort out where payment tools end and savings products begin. The CLARITY Act would set federal authority for digital asset markets, including the boundary between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) 4.
• Regulators’ reading of what counts as “economically or functionally equivalent” to bank interest could reshape crypto business models. The Senate Banking text also narrowed its tokenization provision to tokenized securities, which are traditional financial assets represented digitally on a blockchain, instead of a broader real-world-asset framework 4.
• The bill also opened splits inside the crypto industry’s Washington coalition. Coinbase’s business interests differ from the stance of other players including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm 1.
• Those disputes may make it harder to hold a common line after the crypto industry spent nearly US$250 million backing friendly candidates before the 2024 election 1.