The real winner of the CLARITY Act fight, according to Austin Campbell, isn’t stablecoin advocates or community bankers. It’s Jamie Dimon‘s bonus.
Campbell, founder of Zero Knowledge Consulting, posted on X Friday pushing back against Christopher Williston, president of the Independent Bankers Association of Texas, who had argued that any compromise on the CLARITY Act would risk harming local lending and economic production. “It’s simply impossible to roll over in the fight for liquidity that powers the economies of the places we call home,” Williston said.
Campbell’s response was direct. “If community banks and crypto can’t find a way to work together, we already know who the winners are. It’s not the community banks. It’s not consumers. It’s not the crypto industry,” he wrote. “It is the big banks.”
A manufactured conflict
Campbell argues the animosity between stablecoin-yield providers and community banks is not organic. “The big banks and the bank lobbies they fund have tricked both sides into fighting each other,” he said, framing the two groups as natural allies who share a common enemy. Community banks, he contends, face exactly the kind of technological and regulatory friction that stablecoins are positioned to solve.
The concern from banking lobby groups is that the CLARITY Act, if passed in its current form, could drain deposits from the banking system toward stablecoin products. Standard Chartered put a number to that fear in a recent research note, estimating that wider stablecoin adoption could reduce US bank deposits by one-third of stablecoin market cap.
That figure has sharpened the debate. But Campbell’s argument runs in the opposite direction — that community banks stand to lose more by opposing stablecoins than by engaging with them, while the large institutions collect the gains either way.
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Political pressure from the top
The dispute has pulled in the Trump family this week. Eric Trump posted on X Thursday accusing large banks of lobbying to block Americans from earning higher yields on savings, naming JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo specifically.
President Donald Trump went further, pressing for the Senate’s crypto market-structure bill to advance amid continued disagreements over stablecoin yield payments. “The U.S. needs to get Market Structure done, ASAP,” he said. “The Banks are hitting record profits, and we are not going to allow them to undermine our powerful Crypto Agenda,” he added.
The stablecoin yield question sits at the center of the impasse — whether stablecoin issuers should be permitted to pass interest to holders, which banks argue directly competes with deposit accounts. Community banks, whose business models depend heavily on those deposits, have been among the loudest opponents.
Campbell’s position is that this opposition is misdirected. The technological and regulatory solutions stablecoins offer community banks, he says, draw “a very straight line between the value community banks bring” and what the crypto industry is building. “These are not enemies,” he said. “They are allies.”
Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice.
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