More than 200 comment letters landed at the Treasury Department ahead of this month''s deadline in the stablecoin rulemaking, and a large share of them argue about the same sentence.
The statute governing payment stablecoins bars issuers from paying interest or yield to holders. It does not, on its face, say anything about what an exchange, a broker or an issuer''s corporate affiliate may pay. That gap is now the most valuable ambiguity in digital-asset policy.
Bank trade groups want it closed. Their letters argue that a token paying a competitive rate through an affiliate is a deposit substitute in everything but name, and that permitting it would pull funding out of community banks and into money-market-like instruments with no lending obligation attached.
The industry side reads the text literally. Exchanges and issuers argue Congress wrote a specific prohibition on a specific party, that customer rewards funded by a distributor''s own revenue are marketing rather than interest, and that Treasury cannot expand a statutory ban by regulation.
Treasury staff have signaled that core implementing rules are meant to be finalized before the statute takes full effect, which falls no later than January 2027 — a timeline that leaves little room for a contested rule to be redrafted.
Whichever way it lands, the decision sets the economics of the entire sector. Reserve income is the business; who is allowed to share it determines who can compete for balances.