Author: Delphi Digital Source: X, @Delphi_Digital Translation: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance

The stablecoin issuer is now the 19th largest holder of U.S. Treasuries, holding exactly the same underlying assets that back your savings account. Whether they are allowed to distribute the proceeds of government bonds to holders is one of the core issues in the current field of encryption regulation.

Revenue difference

There is a huge gap between Treasury yields and the interest rates banks pay savers. Treasury yields are currently in the 3.5%–4% range, while the average savings account yield is just 0.39%.

The stablecoin issuer holds the same underlying assets. The GENIUS Act prohibits it from distributing proceeds directly to holders, and regulators are expanding the scope of the ban to cover various circumvention methods that have emerged since then.

If users can hold funds that are liquid at any time, have no credit risk, and can earn interest, the incentive to store cash in traditional bank accounts will be significantly reduced. Critics have raised this to a national security issue. In reality, it threatens the fractional reserve financing model on which the entire credit system depends.

Structural financing problems are real

Banks rely on deposits to make loans. If U.S. dollars flow heavily into fully-reserved stablecoins allocated only to Treasury bonds, private credit creation will contract. Funds will flow to sovereign assets, and the credit transmission mechanism supporting small and medium-sized enterprise loans and consumer credit will begin to fail.

Small and medium-sized banks and credit unions are the first to bear the brunt. They rely heavily on deposits to fund their lending operations. Once these funds flow to the chain, they will lose both interest rate gains and lending capabilities. This is the real paradox in the stablecoin legislation debate: End users will have access to cheaper and faster dollars, but the credit system will lose the deposit base needed to sustain lending.

Everyone wants to be a bank

In the past few months, fintech companies and crypto companies have been competing to obtain banking licenses by applying directly or acquiring existing banks.

After the financial crisis, the United States actually stopped issuing commercial bank licenses for nearly ten years. The number of new banks formed plummeted from about 132 per year to just six. After the licenses dried up, the market no longer tried to be a bank, but built a system around banks; now the trend has completely reversed.

For crypto-native companies and stablecoin issuers, a federal license means access to the FedNow and Fedwire systems and direct control of the clearing layer. For traditional financial technology companies, it means getting rid of dependence on third-party banks and achieving full-stack vertical integration.

Two-way integration is happening:

• In December 2025, the FDIC approved rules allowing state banks it regulates to issue payment stablecoins through subsidiaries;

• In February 2026, the OCC followed suit with similar draft rules for nationally licensed banks.

After the rules are finally implemented, any insured depository institution holding a corresponding license will have a formal channel to issue stablecoins.

The end of vertical integration

Stripe is the most typical case: by acquiring Bridge, Privy, Metronome, and partnering with Paradigm to build Tempo, it is building a complete payment stack from issuance to merchant settlement.

It's not alone in doing this. The stable currency system is highly consistent with the traditional institutional financial system:

• Blockchain clearing replaces Real-Time Gross Settlement System (RTGS)

• Stablecoin issuance replaces commercial bank deposits

• On-chain liquidity and foreign exchange exchange replace agent banks

• Compliance logic replaces anti-money laundering (AML) infrastructure

• Payment applications are built on top of all layers

The top players in fintech, banking, and crypto are trying to control as many of these layers as possible.

Issuer risk becomes a new type of credit risk

Tether and Circle account for more than 84% of the total market capitalization of stablecoins. The brief decoupling of USDC during the Silicon Valley Bank storm clearly demonstrated the concentration risk. Circle was still solvent at the time and had sufficient reserves, but some funds were temporarily trapped in bankrupt banks and could not be used.

In the traditional banking system, payment risks are spread across institutions, and credit risks are spread across the loan books of thousands of banks. In the stablecoin system, liquidation risks that were originally dispersed among counterparties are concentrated at the issuer level. The system has not become risk-free, but risk has migrated vertically: from dispersed counterparty exposure to highly concentrated issuer dependence.

The white label issuance model is expanding, and institutions such as Paxos, Agora, Brale, M0, and Bridge all provide issuance as a service. The market value of assets issued by Paxos has increased nearly 8 times in the past year. The model is that partners such as PayPal are responsible for distribution, and they themselves undertake infrastructure and compliance work. While the model works, it has yet to shake up the existing giants. Liquidity depth of this magnitude has a naturally self-reinforcing effect.

Conclusion

In just a few years, stablecoins have grown from niche trading tools to cross-border payment infrastructure in emerging markets. The next target will be the core financing model of the banking system itself.

The "GENIUS Act" has established a regulatory framework, and the OCC is formulating implementation details, which are scheduled to be finalized in July 2026. The remaining key suspense is whether the CLARITY Act can be passed - it will directly determine whether platforms can provide any form of stablecoin income.