Crypto & banking leaders to meet at White House: What’s at stake

00:00 Speaker A

The sell off in Bitcoin coming as crypto executives and banking chiefs are gearing up to meet at the White House today. The administration is hoping to revive talks over new US crypto legislation and Yahoo Finance’s David Hollereith is with me now to talk more about that. Now, this, this um regulation, right, that we’ve been talking about now for a little while, would sort of um it’s the pipes is how some have described it around crypto, how crypto is traded. Put some regulation and some clarity around all of that.

00:30 Speaker A

What’s what’s the hold up? Why hasn’t it gotten passed yet?

00:33 David Hollereith

Yeah, I I mean, I think that there are a number of reasons, but recently the biggest has been this question of uh stablecoin interest payments, um by third-party crypto firms. So in the actual stablecoin legislation that the president passed last summer, um stable coin issuers were they weren’t allowed to um give customers interest on their balances. But third-party crypto platforms still could. Um or at least it’s a legally gray area at this point. It’s not written in the law.

01:08 David Hollereith

And so what has what has been going on is the banking industry and the crypto industry have been kind of at odds about this, about whether or not that should be settled in this larger piece of legislation that’s currently um making its way in Congress. Not not really so much anymore right now, it’s kind of stalled. But that’s kind of the key issue. And that really came to a head um in recent weeks. We saw actually Coinbase CEO uh Brian Armstrong reject a draft

01:35 David Hollereith

of this most recent bill and it had to do with one, interest payments on stable coins, but also some other topics like how how tokenizing stocks should work, also, um foreign actors, anti-money laundering things. All those issues are in play, but really the banking um interests on on whether or not to pay interest on stable coin reserves is really the one that has come up for to the forefront, excuse me. Um and as far as the White House event today, it’s actually not going to be the banking chiefs.

02:05 David Hollereith

A Coinbase’s CEO of uh or VP of policy will be there. But outside of that, it’s mostly going to be um crypto and bank trade groups that are going to be meeting this afternoon.

02:14 Speaker A

So does that move the needle then if it’s not the executives, the ones who really like have been at odds about this?

02:20 David Hollereith

Yeah, that’s a good question and I I think the understanding is that nothing is going to be like finally solved today. um but it kind of begins discussions where the White House is there mediating sort of both industry positions. And I think that there are some ideas about maybe how crypto platforms could offer interest on stable coins without, you know, doing something that for the banking uh from the banking…