Eric Trump took to social media platform X to accuse major financial institutions like JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo of actively lobbying to prevent the implementation of stablecoin yield projects, claiming their core motivation is to protect the interest margin that sustains their operations.
Currently, mainstream banks offer annual interest rates on savings accounts to ordinary depositors ranging from 0.01% to 0.05%, while these banks deposit customer funds as reserves with the Federal Reserve, earning risk-free returns of over 4%. This means that for every $1 billion in customer deposits, banks can earn approximately $40 million annually from the Federal Reserve, while paying less than $500,000 in interest to depositors—this significant gap constitutes the core source of record profits for banks in recent years.
Now, some stablecoin platforms are attempting to return this interest margin directly to users, offering annual yields of 4% to 5%, which is on par with the rates paid by the Federal Reserve to banks. If users can achieve returns a hundred times greater than traditional savings with the same level of risk in stablecoins, funds will naturally flow from the banking system to crypto assets, creating what is known as a "deposit outflow" effect that directly impacts banks' profit models.
In response, industry organizations like the American Bankers Association oppose stablecoin yield products, citing "systemic risk" and "regulatory instability," emphasizing that these products could threaten the safety of the financial system. However, critics argue that this reasoning is more about masking competitive anxiety. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and some White House officials have explicitly stated that the real barrier is not risk, but rather the suppression of emerging competition by vested interests.
In fact, these two motivations are not mutually exclusive: on one hand, significant deposit outflows could indeed trigger liquidity pressures for banks; on the other hand, banks obstructing innovation to maintain high interest margins is a typical form of market protectionism. This duality creates a regulatory stalemate and highlights the deep structural conflict between traditional finance and emerging digital finance.