#创作者冲榜 SEC Handed Out a Free Pass, But Bitcoin Is Playing Dead: Wall Street and Crypto Elites' "Yield Rights" Meat Grinder

The retail traders in crypto circles must be feeling absolutely surreal these past few days. In mid-March 2026, the U.S. SEC and CFTC rarely aligned, releasing that "token classification guidance" the entire industry has been begging for over eight years. New SEC Chair Paul Atkins made sweeping changes, categorizing crypto assets into five major types, and boldly announced to the world: the vast majority of cryptocurrencies are simply not securities. This is equivalent to issuing a get-out-of-jail-free card to Web3 practitioners who had been brutally crushed by Gary Gensler over the past few years.

According to the script, Bitcoin should have immediately performed a dramatic surge, shooting straight to $100,000. Reality, however, is that Bitcoin sits below the $75,000 resistance level like a man with an enlarged prostate, not only completely flat but actually breaking through the $70,000 mark on the downside.

The regulatory "five-classification" is nothing but a piece of tissue paper—the real prey lies on the back of the ledger

Stop getting excited about the SEC's five categories (digital commodities, digital collectibles, digital utilities, stablecoins, digital securities). This is at most a piece of tissue used by the regulatory agency after its leadership change to wipe away the vomit left by violent enforcement from the previous era. Wall Street's top predators and Silicon Valley's tech elite don't care one bit whether Dogecoin is classified as a commodity or air. In their eyes, there's only one real prey that can print money: the underlying liquidity of stablecoins.

The market's logic of voting with its feet is cold and crystal clear. Reduced compliance costs can certainly let exchanges pay fewer fines, but they can't conjure profits out of thin air.

When the Federal Reserve's interest rate expectations are locked between 3.5% and 3.75%, when the shadow of Iran conflict sends crude oil prices skyrocketing, smart money has already seen through this policy theater's true cards. Large capital is frantically withdrawing from high-risk assets like Bitcoin and pouring into digital dollars. Because in a cycle where rate cuts are indefinitely postponed, whoever controls the digital distribution of dollars controls the tax collection rights of the new financial empire.

This is why the Clarity Act—the legislation that truly determines the underlying architecture of the crypto market—still lies like a corpse in the basement of the Senate Banking Committee. Senator Cynthia Lummis claimed there could be progress by the end of April next year; such a politician's consolation reeks of hypocrisy down to its punctuation marks.

The bill's gridlock isn't because the two parties have technical disagreements, but because Wall Street's century-old banks and Cb-like crypto newcomers are engaged in a brutal, close-quarters knife fight in the back rooms of Congress over "stablecoin yield rights."

"Yield Distribution" is the Original Sin: The Blood and Flesh Mill of Wall Street Old Dogs and Web3 Gamblers

Let's strip bare the business model of stablecoins. You hand over real hard-earned USD dollars to a stablecoin issuer, and they give you a string of code. Then they turn around and use your money to buy U.S. Treasury bonds, pocketing a steady 3-4% risk-free return. This is a nearly cost-free, guaranteed-profit business of extraordinary margins. Cb alone, through just this "interest rate moat," can rake in tens of billions of dollars annually without lifting a finger. Now, scale this logic up to the entire U.S. financial market.

Why can banks rule from Wall Street? Because they've locked in the interest spread from depositors. If the Clarity Act grants stablecoin issuers legal status and allows them to directly pay interest to retail holders of stablecoins (the so-called Rewards Loophole), what do you think happens?

This is the end of traditional banking. Why would an ordinary person keep money in a JPMorgan Chase demand deposit account with less than 1% annualized yield? They could simply convert all their money to compliant stablecoins, leave it in their mobile wallet, and not only enjoy second-level cross-border transfers, but also watch 4% annualized interest hitting their account daily. Once this Pandora's box is opened, the savings pool of traditional banks will be completely drained within months. So the banking system panicked.

Banking lobbying groups poured massive money into Congress, desperately clinging to one bottom line: stablecoins absolutely cannot distribute yields unless the issuer becomes a fully regulated traditional bank. It's like when automobiles first appeared, horse carriage drivers' associations fiercely demanded all cars must have a horse attached to be allowed on the road. This isn't about discussing financial innovation; this is about defending class interests.

Cb and others face a multi-billion-dollar compliance deadlock—either surrender yield distribution rights or never gain legal status. As long as this meat grinder of competing interests keeps running, Bitcoin no matter how deflationary can only wallow in the mud of $70,000.

Traditional Finance's "If You Can't Beat Them, Buy Them": Mastercard's $1.8 Billion Closed-Loop Grand Strategy

While politicians and crypto fundamentalists argue over who gets naming rights to interest distribution, real old money has already started buying at the physical layer. Look at what Mastercard just did. $1.8 billion, directly acquiring BVNK, the British stablecoin infrastructure company. This deal even surpassed Stripe's $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge. One very interesting detail is that BVNK was actually almost acquired by Cb for $2 billion before this. Why did that deal fall through? Why did Mastercard ultimately take over?

Because for crypto enterprises, buying infrastructure is about growing the ecosystem; but for payment giants like Mastercard, buying infrastructure is about buying survival. Mastercard understands better than anyone that the global card network it's operated for fifty years is essentially just an information transmission system. Transaction authorization happens in milliseconds, but fund settlement crawls along another slow traditional banking track for days. Yet enterprises like BVNK processed $30 billion in stablecoin payments across 130+ countries over the past year. This is a dimensional strike. When B2B cross-border payments start getting used to USDC and USDT's second-level settlement and minimal friction, traditional remittance channels become rusty relics.

Wall Street's grand strategy is now completely exposed. They don't want to spend time understanding blockchain's hacker spirit anymore; they're choosing to directly buy the toll booths of the highway. Regulators use the compliance club in front to drive crypto savages into a pen, traditional giants use checkbooks behind to acquire all core infrastructure. No matter how the Clarity Act ultimately rules on interest distribution, as long as funds keep flowing through the digital dollar pipeline, Mastercard and others will steadily continue skimming. This $1.8 billion acquisition not only locks in the future of technology, but also locks in the fantasy of cypherpunks trying to overthrow traditional finance.

The Endgame Before Rate Cuts: Not Giving Retail Traders a Cut is the Only Consensus Among the Elite

Once you see through this game, you understand why the crypto market reacted so coldly after the SEC's classification guidance. Because the entire industry has transitioned from the "fight for survival" wild era into the "dividing the cake" oligarch era. Balance sheets don't lie. Venus Protocol crashed due to vulnerabilities, crypto platforms cut 12% of staff introducing AI to reduce costs and improve efficiency, Bitcoin OGs cashed out hundreds of millions after the positive catalysts landed by throwing in offers.

When macroeconomic headwinds can't be resolved because inflation won't come down and the knife hangs high, no institution is willing to pay for illusory decentralization faith. What they want is real U.S. dollar cash flow. The Clarity Act will definitely eventually pass, but absolutely not in a way that benefits retail traders. After Wall Street banking moguls and Web3 top exchanges spit at each other a few rounds and manipulate in smoke-filled rooms, they will inevitably reach a dirty yet perfect compromise: underlying protocols must be compliant, interest earnings will be layered and systematically retained by institutions through perfectly legal means, and in exchange, retail traders will gain an incredibly smooth, completely integrated into daily life stablecoin payment experience.

In this endgame battle over digital dollar liquidity, the SEC handles issuing permits, Congress handles distributing profits, traditional payment giants handle laying pipes. As for you and me who contributed all the real money to this closed loop, our only role is to continue burning quietly as a battery in this brand new digital financial matrix packaged as the Web3 revolution.