The nation’s most powerful banker offered stern words for the digital assets industry this week, as traditional finance and crypto backers duke it out over key language in a stalled crypto market bill.
The bill faces numerous hurdles, but the most prominent involves a dispute over the ability of crypto companies to pay rewards to customers who hold stablecoins, crypto tokens pegged to the value of the dollar. Crypto giants like Coinbase appear willing to die on the hill that they should be able to offer customers significant yield on stablecoin holdings, while banks have argued such programs could make low-yield bank accounts less attractive, and are unfair.
When pressed on the issue Monday, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon struck a decidedly hardline tone, arguing that if banks were subject to certain restrictions that crypto firms offering yield on stablecoin holdings weren’t, the situation could spell disaster for the U.S. economy.
“It can’t be: You have these people doing one thing without any regulation, and these people doing another,” Dimon said in an interview with CNBC. “If you do that, the public will pay. It will get bad.”
Dimon emphasized the long list of rules that banks offering yield to customers need to comply with, including participation in the federal deposit insurance program, and adherence to numerous requirements related to anti-money laundering standards, transparency, community investment, reporting, and governance.
“If you want to be a bank, become a bank,” Dimon said. “Then you can do whatever you want under bank law.”
The JPMorgan CEO—a noted Bitcoin skeptic—added he believes such regulations are important, because “you want a safe financial system.”
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Under the stablecoin-focused GENIUS Act, which was signed into law by President Donald Trump last summer, stablecoin issuers must comply with certain rules related to anti-money laundering, liquidity, and risk management. But the current drama playing out in Washington has more to do with middlemen like Coinbase, which are seeking to have the right to pass stablecoin rewards onto customers enshrined—or at the very least, not reduced—in a sprawling crypto market structure bill.
That bill, hotly desired by most of the crypto industry, was poised to be voted on by the powerful Senate Banking Committee in January. But on the eve of the vote, Coinbase abruptly pulled support for the legislation, citing the likelihood that senators would approve amendments to the bill restricting stablecoin rewards programs.
