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#Clarity法案最新草案 Wall Street's guillotine: When the "yield-generating frenzy" of dollar stablecoins gets zeroed out with one click by politicians!
On Wall Street on March 24, 2026, the air was thick with the stench of blood. Just yesterday, those Web3 elites who were still swirling wine glasses in their Manhattan penthouses, celebrating crypto's march toward compliance, were kicked off the balcony by a policy draft that flew in from Washington.
Circle (ticker: CRCL), the stablecoin issuer that championed "absolute compliance," experienced an epic collapse immediately after the stock market opened, with its stock price plummeting 19% like a kite with a severed string. It not only ruthlessly broke through the 21-day moving average support level but also set the most devastating single-day decline in the company's history.
In the face of this avalanche, no one could stand apart. Coinbase (ticker: COIN), Wall Street's first crypto stock and Circle's closest ally and primary distribution channel, saw its stock price also plunge approximately 9%, instantly breaking through the 50-day lifeline. The culprit behind all this wasn't a hacker attack or code vulnerability, but a newly revised draft bill called the "Digital Asset Market Clarity Act."
This text, sealed in closed-door meetings by Senators Thom Tillis and Angela Alsobrooks, used just one casual sentence to surgically sever the central artery of the entire centralized stablecoin industry: a comprehensive ban on all "passive yield" behavior targeting stablecoin holders, and a complete shutdown of any profit structures that are "economically equivalent to interest." In this magical capital market, you thought you were leading a decentralization revolution, but politicians can see clearly—you're just conducting unlicensed deposit-taking traditional banking operations under the guise of blockchain. When the regulatory scythe finally comes down, those financial arbitrage games wrapped in geek jargon instantly reveal their true nature.
Pulling the plug on the money-printing machine called "transaction fees"
To understand the underlying logic of this crash, you first need to strip away stablecoin issuers' shiny "tech company" veneer and see how they actually make money. This has nothing to do with inscrutable cyberpunk black magic—it's a brutally simple money-making machine that requires doing nothing.
Take Circle as an example: USDC currently has a total market cap of $78.6 billion. What does this mean? It means $78.6 billion in hard cash has been handed to Circle for free. In the traditional financial world, when you deposit money in a bank, the bank still has to begrudgingly pay you interest. But in this crypto scheme called the "transaction fee model," Circle takes these billions of dollars to purchase absolutely safe short-term U.S. Treasury bonds, earning risk-free substantial returns, while early USDC holders don't get a single cent.
To make this flywheel spin faster and get more people willing to convert their money into USDC, Circle and Coinbase built a genius-level "benefit transfer pipeline." Although the previously passed GENIUS Act explicitly prohibited stablecoin issuers from directly paying interest to users, capital is always smarter than legislation.
Circle cuts a large portion of the massive returns generated from Treasury reserves and hands it to Coinbase, which then channels these funds back to USDC holders through various "reward programs" on its platform. In analysts' eyes, USDC's yield business contributed nearly 20% of Coinbase's total revenue. This formed a perfect closed loop: users got interest-like returns, platforms got massive liquidity, and issuers expanded market share.
But the latest draft of the "Clarity Act" is like a moody obsessive-compulsive patient who directly kicked over this carefully designed profit-sharing table. The draft explicitly states that not only direct interest payments are forbidden, but any "structurally equivalent to interest" channel model must also be completely eliminated. It's like you set up a toll booth at a crossroads. Previously, police wouldn't let you collect cash directly, so you had drivers scan codes to buy your overpriced bottled water. Now police tell you that as long as you make drivers pay, regardless of how you do it, it all counts as robbery.
Amir Hajian, a digital asset researcher at Keyrock, nailed it perfectly—this directly drained the core driver propelling stablecoin adoption. When the plug is pulled on this money-printing machine by politicians, Circle's stock price, which had surged 170% crazily since February, naturally has no choice but to plummet in the most devastating fashion toward true value.
Old money's terror and the community banks' battle for survival
You might ask: why did Washington politicians suddenly come down so hard on stablecoin yield mechanisms? Is it really to protect those retail investors who went all-in at the crypto casino?
Don't be naive. In this world, the only force that can make politicians reach cross-party consensus so efficiently is the extreme terror of Old Money in traditional finance. The essence of this legislation has nothing to do with guiding technological innovation—it's an outright battle to defend traditional bank deposits. The past two years haven't been kind to traditional banking, especially those community banks scattered across U.S. states that rely on local resident deposits to finance small and medium-sized enterprise loans. When the Federal Reserve maintained a high-interest environment, traditional banks had to stingy with deposit interest to control funding costs. Meanwhile, USDC in crypto exchanges could easily provide highly attractive "demand deposit rewards" through the transmission of reserve returns.
The American Bankers Association lobbying group on Capitol Hill is famous for its iron-fisted tactics. In their view, if stablecoins were allowed to continue offering implicit interest, this would no longer be crypto's niche self-entertainment—it would be blatantly siphoning deposits from the traditional banking system. Capital is extremely intelligent; once the general public realizes that downloading a Coinbase app gets them passive returns far exceeding what their corner community bank offers, a massive deposit exodus becomes inevitable. This would be a devastating blow to the credit capacity and very survival of the traditional financial system. Therefore, the compromise in this draft is extremely precise and ruthless.
Legislators made a clear cut: allow stablecoin rewards based on "transaction activity," but absolutely prohibit passive yield based on "balances." In other words, you can encourage users to consume, transfer, and generate transaction flows using stablecoins, just like credit card rewards, but you absolutely cannot let users earn money just by keeping it in their accounts. Politicians used legal boundaries to forcibly push stablecoins back to their original design—a pure payment tool, not a high-yield deposit account dressed in digital clothing.
This is not only a dimensionally downgrading blow to Circle's core business model, but also a successful sniper attack by old money on Wall Street against Silicon Valley's new financial elite.
Tether's dark humor: The offshore pirate's "reverse compliance" backstab
If Circle's stock price collapse is a tragedy, then another event that happened in the crypto market that day turned the show into an absurd dark comedy. Just as the obedient Circle, submitting to annual Deloitte comprehensive audits and desperately fawning over American regulators, was being ground into dust by its own government's bill, its greatest enemy, the offshore behemoth Tether, which has long lurked in regulatory gray areas, dropped a bombshell on the same day. USDT, with a market cap of $184 billion and firmly occupying the stablecoin throne, announced that it had hired one of the global "Big Four" accounting firms to conduct its first comprehensive formal audit of its reserves. This news was the ultimate psychological blow to Circle.
Since its 2014 birth, Tether has been questioned by countless short-sellers and regulators about its reserve transparency. Previously, they only provided vague quarterly "attestations," not even proper audit reports. Through this wild growth, USDT captured the vast majority of global liquidity. Now the plot twisted. Just as Circle suffered because of excessive compliance, with its revenue model squeezed by American domestic law, Tether, having already amassed tremendous profits in outlaw mode, turned around and used those winnings to buy the credibility endorsement of a top accounting firm.
This is an extraordinarily arrogant dimensionally-downgrading blow: the compliance walls you at Circle labored to build? I at Tether can just buy that with money. And the domestic regulatory meat grinder you now face? I'm an offshore issuer—I don't need to care at all. To Wall Street institutions, this contrast is extremely lethal. If Tether truly passes the Big Four's comprehensive audit, washing away its long-standing opacity label, then its risk rating in institutional investors' eyes will drop significantly. On one side, there's USDC, constrained by the "Clarity Act," facing legal liability just for giving users some interest. On the other side, there's USDT, about to receive top-tier endorsement and completely unrestricted by America's harsh domestic legislation. There's no need to think for even a second about which way capital will flow.
Tether's announcement of an audit at this critical moment was absolutely a carefully calculated public relations battle, not only delivering a ruthless backstab to Circle but also raising a gleaming middle finger at the entire Washington regulatory system.
The cruel tale of degenerating from "yield-generating assets" to "game tokens"
The panic triggered by the draft continues to spread, and its profound restructuring of the entire crypto finance landscape is just beginning. Stablecoins stripped of passive yield ability now face a cruel genetic downgrade: they'll be forced to degenerate from "yield-generating assets" with compounding capability into pure media of exchange with zero time value. In blunt terms, they become nothing more than cyber tokens usable only for transaction settlement. This degradation delivers a structural blow to the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. Previously, large amounts of conservative capital were willing to stay on-chain because the underlying stablecoins themselves came with risk-free returns, providing a solid foundation for the entire DeFi LEGO tower. Once the "Clarity Act" completely seals the interest-transmission pathway for centralized issuers, users accustomed to effortless gains will face two choices: either take on extremely high smart contract and liquidation cascade risks by throwing stablecoins into decentralized lending protocols that could collapse at any moment to chase meager returns; or simply withdraw their money back to the traditional banking system. Either outcome will cause an irreversible contraction in overall crypto market liquidity.
But capital will never sit idle. Just as predicted by Ryan Rasmussen, research director at Bitwise, this market will definitely spawn new workaround monetization schemes. Since you can't directly call it "interest" and can't be structurally "equivalent to interest," platforms will definitely force financial engineers to become literary masters and game designers. We can foresee that the future crypto market will be flooded with extremely complex "loyalty programs," "activity mining," or "ecosystem contribution value rewards." Users may no longer earn returns simply by having money in their accounts; instead, they'll have to complete meaningless daily clicks, transfers, or interactions on platforms to collect their share of dividends. This is undoubtedly a massive regression and tragedy.
To comply with rigid regulatory language, the entire industry is forced to complicate, distort, and even gamify what was originally an efficient, transparent revenue-sharing mechanism. Clear Street analysts tried to calm markets, arguing that the current selloff is an "ask questions later" overreaction, after all Circle still holds 30% of a market destined to expand tenfold. But this fails to obscure a cold fact: in the face of absolute regulatory supremacy, crypto's financial innovation remains fragile as paper. The moment politicians reached compromise across that oak table on Capitol Hill, the golden age of stablecoins earning money effortlessly was nailed permanently into history's coffin.
On Wall Street on March 24, 2026, the air was thick with the stench of blood. Just yesterday, those Web3 elites still clinking wine glasses in Manhattan penthouses celebrating cryptocurrency's compliance breakthrough were kicked off the terrace by a draft proposal flying in from Washington.
Circle (ticker: CRCL), the flagship "absolutely compliant" dollar stablecoin issuer, experienced an epic collapse upon opening on the U.S. stock market without warning, with its stock price plummeting 19% like a kite with a severed string, not only brutally breaching the 21-day moving average support level but also marking the most devastating single-day decline in the company's history.
In the face of this avalanche, no one could stand aside. As Circle's closest ally and primary distribution channel, crypto's first publicly-traded stock Cb (ticker: COIN) followed suit with a dive of around 9%, instantly breaking below the 50-day lifeline. The culprit behind all this was not a hacker attack, not a code vulnerability, but a newly revised draft bill called the "Digital Asset Market Clarity Act" (Clarity Act).
This text, finalized by Senators Thom Tillis and Angela Alsobrooks in closed-door meetings, used just one casual sentence to precisely sever the main artery of the entire centralized stablecoin industry: a comprehensive ban on any "passive yield" activities targeting stablecoin holders, and killing off any revenue structure that is economically "equivalent to interest." In this magical capital market, you thought you were running a decentralization revolution, but politicians saw it crystal clear—you were just using blockchain as a shell to run unlicensed deposit-taking, traditional banking operations. When the regulatory sickle finally swings down, those financial arbitrage games wrapped in geek jargon instantly reveal their true form.
Unplugging the Money-Printing Machine Called "Toll Fees"
To understand the underlying logic of this crash, you first need to peel away the glossy "tech company" veneer of stablecoin issuers and see how they actually make money. This isn't some unfathomable cyberpunk black magic at all—it's a brutally simple money-printing operation.
Take Circle as an example: USDC currently has a market cap of $78.6 billion. What does that mean? It means $78.6 billion in real, hard cash has been handed over to Circle for free. In the traditional financial world, when you deposit money in a bank, the bank grudgingly has to pay you interest. But in this crypto game called the "toll fee model," Circle takes these hundreds of billions and buys absolutely safe short-term U.S. Treasury bonds, harvesting risk-free hefty returns, while early USDC holders get nothing.
To spin this flywheel faster and get more people willing to convert their money into USDC, Circle and Cb constructed what could be called a genius "profit transmission pipeline." Although the previously passed GENIUS Act explicitly prohibited stablecoin issuers from directly paying interest to users, capital is always smarter than law.
Circle slices out a large portion of the massive returns generated by Treasury reserves and distributes them to Cb, while Cb then returns these funds through various "rewards programs" on its platform in disguised forms to users holding USDC. In analysts' eyes, USDC's yield business contributed nearly 20% of Cb's total revenue. This formed a perfect closed loop: users got deposit-like returns, platforms got massive liquidity, and issuers expanded market share.
But the latest draft of the "Clarity Act" is like a short-tempered perfectionist who directly kicks over this carefully designed profit-sharing table. The draft text explicitly states that not only is directly paying interest prohibited, but any "channel model economically equivalent to interest" must also be totally eliminated. It's like you're toll-collecting at a checkpoint. Previously, police didn't let you collect cash directly, so you had drivers scan a code to buy your overpriced bottled water. Now police tell you that as long as you make drivers pay, no matter what position you use, it all counts as robbery.
Amir Hajian, a digital asset researcher at Keyrock, put it perfectly: this directly drained the core driver of stablecoin adoption. When the money-printing machine's plug is ruthlessly pulled by politicians, Circle's stock price, which had skyrocketed 170% since February, naturally can only crash downward to value reality.
The Old Money's Fear and the Community Banks' Defense War
You might ask why Washington politicians suddenly came down so hard on stablecoin yield mechanisms. Is it really to protect those retail investors who got carried away gambling in crypto casinos?
Don't be naive. In this world, the only force that can make politicians so efficiently reach cross-party consensus is the extreme fear of Old Money in traditional finance. The essence of this legislation is not some normative guidance for technological innovation at all, but a naked-faced battle to defend traditional bank deposits. Over the past two years, traditional banking has had it rough, especially those community banks scattered across American states that rely on absorbing local residents' deposits to issue small and micro loans. When the Federal Reserve maintains a high-interest environment, traditional banks have to be stingy with deposit interest to control funding costs. And simultaneously, USDC in crypto exchanges can easily offer highly attractive "demand deposits rewards" by transmitting reserve returns.
The American Bankers Association's lobby group on Capitol Hill is famous for its iron fist. In their view, if stablecoins are allowed to continue implicitly paying interest, this is no longer crypto's self-entertainment in a niche circle, but blatantly siphoning off deposits from the traditional banking system. Capital is extremely smart—once the public realizes they only need to download a Cb app to get far higher passive returns than their corner community bank, a massive deposit migration becomes inevitable. This would be a devastating blow to the credit capacity and survival foundation of the traditional financial system. Therefore, the compromise result of this draft is extremely precise and vicious.
Legislators made a cut: allow stablecoin rewards based on "transaction activity," but absolutely prohibit passive yields based on "balances." In other words, you can encourage users to spend stablecoins, make transfers, and generate transaction flows like credit card points, but you absolutely cannot let users earn money just by sitting on cash in their accounts. Politicians use the law's boundaries to forcefully push stablecoins back to their original definition—a pure payment tool, not a high-yield deposit account dressed in digital clothes.
This is not just a dimensionality reduction attack on Circle's core business model, but a successful sniper strike by Wall Street's old-guard capital against Silicon Valley's financial upstarts.
Tether's Dark Humor: The "Reverse Compliance" Backstab of an Offshore Pirate
If Circle's stock crash is a tragedy, then something else that happened in the crypto market that day turned this play into an absurd black comedy. Just as Circle, obediently listening, undergoing full Deloitte audits year after year, and desperately kowtowing to American regulators, was being pressed face-first into the ground by its own government's legislation, its biggest rival, the offshore behemoth Tether frequently dancing in regulatory gray zones, dropped a bombshell the same day. Tether, with a market cap of $184 billion and firmly occupying the stablecoin throne, announced that it had hired one of the global "Big Four" accounting firms to conduct its first comprehensive, formal audit of its reserves. This news was absolutely the ultimate psychological blow to Circle.
Since its birth in 2014, Tether has been questioned by countless short-sellers and regulatory departments about its reserves' transparency. Previously, they only provided vague quarterly "proofs," refusing to even give proper audit reports. Leveraging this wild growth, USDT captured the vast majority of global liquidity. Now the plot has reversed. When Circle faces domestic legal constraints because it's too compliant and its revenue model is tightly controlled by American law, Tether, which has already made a fortune in outlaw mode, is using its massive profits to buy a credit endorsement from a top-tier auditing firm.
This is an extremely arrogant dimensionality reduction strike: the compliance barriers you Circle carefully constructed, I Tether can buy with money; and the domestic regulatory grinder you're now facing, I as an offshore issuer don't need to deal with at all. In Wall Street institutions' eyes, this contrast is extremely deadly. If Tether truly passes a complete Big Four audit and whitewashes its long-standing opacity label, its risk rating among institutional investors will drop significantly. On one side, there's USDC constrained by the "Clarity Act," facing legal lawsuits just for giving users a little interest; on the other side, there's USDT about to get top-tier endorsement and completely exempt from America's harsh domestic legislation. How would capital choose? This needs zero seconds of thought.
Tether announcing its audit at this critical moment is absolutely a carefully calculated PR campaign, not only stabbing Circle viciously in the back but flipping off the entire Washington regulatory system with a gleaming middle finger.
The Cruel Narrative: Degradation from "Yield-Bearing Assets" to "Entertainment Tokens"
The panic triggered by the draft continues to spread as its far-reaching restructuring of the entire crypto finance landscape is just beginning. Stablecoins stripped of their passive yield capability are facing a cruel genetic downgrade: they will be forced to degrade from a "yield-bearing asset" with compounding capability into a purely valueless medium with no time value—to put it bluntly, nothing but a pile of cyber entertainment tokens for transaction settlement only. This degradation is a structural blow to the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. Previously, large amounts of conservative capital were willing to stay on-chain because the underlying stablecoins themselves came with risk-free returns, providing a solid foundation for the entire DeFi lego tower. Once the "Clarity Act" completely blocks centralized issuers' profit transmission paths, those users accustomed to passive earnings will be forced to face two choices: either take on extreme smart contract risks and cascading liquidation risks, throwing stablecoins into those decentralized lending protocols that could collapse anytime to chase meager returns; or simply withdraw money back to the traditional banking system. Either outcome will cause irreversible shrinkage in the overall liquidity of the crypto market.
But capital will never sit idle. As Bitwise's research director Ryan Rasmussen predicted, this market will definitely spawn new workaround monetization schemes. Since you can't directly call it "interest" and can't be economically "equivalent to interest," each platform will definitely force their financial engineers to become literary masters and game designers. We can foresee that future crypto markets will be flooded with extremely complex "loyalty programs," "activity mining," or "ecosystem contribution rewards." Users may no longer earn returns simply because they have money in their accounts, but must complete meaningless clicks, transfers, or interactions on the platform daily to claim their piece of dividends. This is undoubtedly a massive regression and tragedy.
To cope with rigid regulatory language, the entire industry is forced to complicate, distort, and even gamify what were originally efficient and transparent yield distribution mechanisms. Clear Street analysts try to calm the market, arguing the current sell-off is an "shoot first, ask questions later" overreaction, after all Circle still holds 30% of a market destined to expand tenfold. But this cannot hide a cold fact: in the face of absolute regulatory supremacy, crypto's financial innovation remains too fragile to withstand a blow. The moment politicians reach compromise at the oak tables on Capitol Hill, the golden age of stablecoins making effortless money is completely nailed into history's coffin.