Crypto vs. Banks: Who Controls America’s Money? | Summer Mersinger
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You can get a 4% or more reward for having stablecoins versus your bank deposits which are less than 0.7% yield. It's a competitive thing now and they don't want to compete. My feeling is let's have an even playing field here. If you want to give that APR in your savings accounts, great, do it. Then we can compete on a level playing field. But this idea that they're going to kind of hamstring us because they don't want to compete, I think, is really unfortunate.
Bankless nation, we are here with Summer Mercinger, the CEO of the Blockchain Association, previous CFTC commissioner, and we're gonna talk about banks today on the podcast. Summer, welcome to Bankless.
Thanks for having me on today.
Summer, I wanna start by just kinda setting the table here about this conversation that we're going to have, because there is a battle brewing. There's a war afoot. Maybe to really kinda set the context for why that is happening, can can you just talk about the the win, the victory that crypto took from the banks with the genius act? What victory did we grab that the banks are now upset about?
Well it's interesting because this was a negotiation so at the end of the day you know we came across came away with Genius which is great for the market. It brings clarity. You've got customer protections there. You've got a clear regulatory framework on federal side, state side. So a lot of great wins. But the issues the banks are having right now with the ability to give rewards for stablecoins, let's say if you're buying them on Coinbase or some other exchange and they're able to give you rewards, the banks think that's a loophole. But what's interesting is the stablecoin issuers were not
What did it take for the banks to realize that they gave away more than they wanted to give away? Did they just not realize the loophole? Why did on our end, the word that Ryan and I have been using is they have been caught flat footed about about this. Maybe you could talk about like why they are now reconsidering this.
Yeah. I I say flat footed too because I I don't think that they were prepared for to go up against crypto, to be honest. I think they were a little intimidated, because we have the American voice behind us. We have voters behind us. And so I think they realized afterwards, you know, there's competition now. They have to compete. And this idea that you can get a 4% or more reward for having stablecoins versus your bank deposits which are less than 0.7% yield, it's a competitive thing now and they don't want to compete. And my feeling is let's have an even playing field here. If you want to give
I guess that's a really good point. Right? They could also just offer on you know, they have stable coins. They could offer to their customers that 4% reward as well. They could just compete with crypto.
Exactly. And you think about it, they take your deposits and they lend that out. So they use your capital to make other money and you're getting less than 1% APR, the stablecoin issuers have to hold that in reserve. So they can't use your money in a way that the banks do with lending. And yet they're able to give a 4%, you know, and this is the exchanges giving a 4% reward. So you would think the banks would be able to compete a little bit better in this space given that they are actually taking our capital and using it to make more money.
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