Why banks blew it on the Clarity Act, while crypto brokers operate as normal

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Scott Melker and Coinbase (COIN) CEO Brian Armstrong discuss how big banks fumbled the Clarity Act by getting caught up in stablecoin rewards, potentially leaving themselves worse off as crypto brokers continue operating as usual.

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00:00 Speaker A

Didn't the banks effectively just shoot themselves in the foot by blocking clarity, which could have actually put more restrictions on Coinbase and others on rewards?

00:10 Speaker B

Yeah, I mean, I couldn't have said it better myself. Um, you know, we're happy to work with anybody in this process. We we listened to the concerns of the banks. We went and talked to some of the community banks, we started providing services to community banks, um, along with the big banks in terms of how they could integrate stable coins. We wanted really all of them to win.

00:27 Speaker B

But somehow the bank lobby um got really spun up on this issue of stable coin rewards. You know, I I think because some of the big banks just didn't want the competition, uh and they wanted to use the government to kind of squash their competition. But

00:41 Speaker B

um, you know, you're right. at the end of the I I made this point to several of them. I said, well, if you don't want to come to the table and work on an iteration of this bill, then genius is already the law of the land. That's so, you know, that's what it basically we fall back to at this point where uh we can continue to pay rewards

01:00 Speaker B

in an unfettered way on uh stable coins. And I think that's good for American consumers. We we were in the interest of getting something done, we made some concessions in clarity uh in negotiations with the banks that the Senate facilitated, but, you know, I guess we don't have to do that now. Uh it's a little unclear to me why they fought so hard against it if they were so worried about stable coin rewards, they're in a worse position now.