The post Stablecoin yield isn’t really about stablecoins appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

As Congress debates crypto market structure legislation, one issue has emerged as especially contentious: whether stablecoins should be allowed to pay yield. On one side, you have banks fighting to protect their traditional hold over consumer deposits that underpin much of the U.S. economy’s credit system. On the other side, crypto industry players are seeking to pass on yield, or “rewards,” to stablecoin holders. On its face, this looks like a narrow question about one niche of the crypto economy. In reality, it goes to the heart of the U.S. financial system. The fight over yield-bearing stablecoins isn’t really about stablecoins. It is about deposits, and about who gets paid on them. For decades, most consumer balances in the United States have earned little or nothing for their owners, but that doesn’t mean the money sat idle. Banks take deposits and put them to work: lending, investing, and earning returns. What consumers have received in exchange is safety, liquidity, and convenience (bank runs happen but are rare and are mitigated by the FDIC insurance regime). What banks receive is the bulk of the economic upside generated by those balances. That model has been stable for a long time. Not because it is inevitable, but because consumers had no realistic alternative. With new technology, that is now changing. A shift in expectations The current legislative debate over stablecoin yield is more a sign of a deeper shift in how people expect money to behave. We are moving toward a world in which balances are expected to earn by default, not as a special feature reserved for sophisticated investors. Yield is becoming passive rather than opt-in. And increasingly, consumers expect to capture more of the returns generated by their own capital rather than have them absorbed upstream by intermediaries. Once that expectation…

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Filed under: News - @ January 24, 2026 10:15 pm