Brian Armstrong

We don't represent the whole crypto industry, but from a Coinbase point of view, I was not comfortable with the draft text as written, and I'm glad that everyone came back for another round of negotiation.

Oh, yeah, I mean, this is not our bill.

I actually, I give all the credit really to the Senate, and certainly President Trump has said that this is a core part of his crypto agenda.

So my impression is that the White House is fully leaned in here and wants to get something done, as do we, as do the bank CEOs that I met with today.

So I'm not seeing any real barriers here.

There are some people who are a little grumpy.

I think they got caught off guard that we didn't support the draft as is.

But it's kind of like that metaphor of three blind people looking at an elephant and everyone is trying to figure out... there's probably somebody in the administration who had that point of view, but that's not... the people we're speaking with I don't think have taken that approach.

They actually very much want to get this done.

Yeah, so that's certainly one of the core parts of the debate.

I think that some of the bank CEOs I've spoken with have kind of said, hey, we have this really high regulatory burden with being a bank.

And what you're doing kind of looks like a bank.

And so we think it's super unfair.

You should have to have a bank license, too.

And what I tell them is, well, we're not doing something very important that you do.

We do not do fractional reserve lending, which means, for those who don't know, at a bank, you deposit your funds.

they're not keeping your money there.

They're actually lending it out and earning interest on that, and then they pay you a very small percentage of that.

Like the average savings account makes like 14 basis points or something.

And that's called net interest margin, and that's the whole bank business model.