US President Donald Trump and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong met behind closed doors shortly before the president said bankers are trying to undermine the GENIUS Act in a Truth Social post, CoinDesk confirmed.
“America needs to finish the market structure as soon as possible. Americans should make more money with their money,” Trump said in Tuesday’s post. “Banks are making record profits and we are not going to let them undermine our powerful crypto agenda that will end up going to China and other countries if we don’t address the Clarity Act.”
The meeting between Armstrong and Trump was first reported by Politico. The president later publicly endorsed the “position in [the] “The current lobbying standoff with banks has derailed a major cryptocurrency bill.”
The media outlet cited “two people with knowledge of the matter who were granted anonymity to discuss a matter behind closed doors” as the source of the meeting between Trump and Armstrong. He also said it was unclear what the two discussed during the meeting.
However, he reiterated, “it came just before Trump wrote on social media that banks ‘need to reach a good deal with the crypto industry’ to advance digital asset legislation that has stalled on Capitol Hill.”
The White House and Coinbase have not responded to a request for comment from CoinDesk.
The market structure bill has been stalled since lawmakers on the Senate Banking Committee were scheduled to debate and vote on it. The point holding back the passage of the cryptocurrency bill is that banks argue that interest rates on stablecoins could affect bank deposits and therefore, in particular, their creditworthiness. Crypto exchanges say people should be able to earn rewards for their stablecoin holdings, which they say the GENIUS Act allows.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said Tuesday that stablecoin issuers that pay interest on customer balances should be regulated like banks. Patrick Witt, executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets, responded to Dimon, saying that “the trick here is that it is not the payment of the yield on a balance per se that requires bank-like regulations, but rather the lending or remortgaging of the dollars that make up the underlying balance.” Witt also said that the GENIUS Act “explicitly prohibits stablecoin issuers from doing the latter. Stablecoins ≠ Deposits.”
Cryptocurrency-related stocks, including COIN, rose on Wednesday amid a broader rise in cryptocurrency prices. COIN rose above $200, reaching its highest price since late January.
