Stablecoin Rewards’ Last Hope – Clarity Act

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Summary

  • Clarity Act stuck in Senate on Stablecoin Rewards, 70% chance of passage this year
  • Stablecoin yield (or anything that resembles it) goes away, and rewards look more like what you have on your Visa card. Coinbase pulled out because of crypto restrictions in the bill (not stablecoin).
  • Industry will likely pivot to sweep, and Stableocin becomes just another rail, which will require consumer and merchant adoption, without the big “draw” of balance rewards. Thus, balances stay in transactional and interest-bearing accounts, and friction increases w/ stablecoin payments.
  • Politics of key players and quotes in blog today.

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025 (H.R. 3633) is the last hope for Stablecoin issuers to save rewards. While the bill passed the House with a strong bipartisan vote on July 17, 2025, its progress has stalled in the Senate (as of Feb 2028) with intense disagreements regarding the regulation of stablecoin “rewards” and yield-like incentives.

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No more Stablecoin “rewards”

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The OCC Just Dropped the Hammer on Stablecoin Yield: Why “Rewards” Are the New Front Line

Updated (Huge Impact to Tether and other non-US Stablecoin Issuers)

As a payments expert who has watched the “shadow banking” sector flirt with regulatory boundaries for years, today’s draft guidance from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) on the GENIUS Act implementation is my “I told you so” (60 day comment period).

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BankID Norway – Evolution and Success

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If you follow my 80+ blogs on identity, you should like this success story today.  The Norwegian digital identity scheme, BankID, serves as the #2 best financial identity case study (behind India’s UIDAI) with a penetration rate of 97% across 4.7 million citizens. What could US banks learn? What are their challenges in replicating this model? 

Today I’m giving the background on what BankID is.. In part 2 I’m going to interview my good friend Eric Woodward, former president of Early Warning and the creator of Zelle_ID (see youtube), at least until it was killed as the new CEO asked “what on earth does identity have to do with payments”. OMG

The FIDO Alliance is hosting a Webinar on Bank ID Norway tomorrow at 7am pacific.

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Keeping Up With Chaos: A Payments Stakeholder Reality Check

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Short Blog – Bullets

It’s getting harder to keep up with payments, a subsector that has not been great for payment investors, between the Saaspocalypse, AI, agentic commerce, stablecoins, the Genius Act, open bank charters, and COF buying Brex, we are deep into “what just happened?” era. While I see tremendous opportunities, not everyone is impacted the same (see 2025: The Great Decoupling).

You don’t read this blog for deep tech insight; you read it to understand where change is actually happening and where the money, risk, and power are moving. Today is a short recap of which stakeholders face the biggest near-term impact, where progress is being made and where investment is flowing.

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PayPal – Alex is Gone, Enrique is In.. Recommended Focus

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Don’t say I didn’t tell you. As I related in June 2025 The Shakeup PayPal Needs, Dan created a dumpster fire that the BOD just added to in their AWOL engagement. 

Yesterday PayPal delivered FXN Branded growth of 1%, and announced that PayPal CEO Aex Chriss is out and HP’s CEO Enrique Lores is in (March 1st).  This event serves as the final, public admission of a decade-long strategic failure. Lores replacement of Chriss hopefully marks the end of an era of “spectator leadership” and the beginning of a desperate attempt to reintegrate a fragmented “mash” of acquisitions into a cohesive operating model. To understand the depth of the “dumpster fire” that Lores inherits, let’s look back across the last eight years, beginning with the BOD’s decision to renew Dan Schulman’s contract, a move that effectively decapitated PayPal’s operational core and set the stage for its current state of institutional irrelevance among top merchants

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Strategic Innovation Era: Part 1 – Agentic Commerce

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The opposite of Web3, the biggest companies are investing in AI and DLT to redesign the value chain. This one is long.. 12 pages. This is not a repackaging of prior blogs, today I break down how I see Banks, Retailers and Google collaboratively investing to make agentic work. It won’t be a hockey stick, but it will fundementally redesign the value chain. An extinction-level event for those who don’t invest. My main focus is on Google’s unique capability to manage MANY AGENTS and how that orchestration happens from an economic perspective. My predicted winners: Google, First-Mover Retailers like Walmart, Card Networks, and new intermediaries that can build specialized agents.

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CCCA: 5% chance that 5% of Network EBIT could be affected (in 2+ years)

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Update to my 2023 blog on CCCA Complex Politics and Consequences. I’ve spent the last few weeks digging into the latest bill and I see an overstatement of potential impact that most analysts seem to have missed:

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UCP Enables a New Economy

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Yesterday, Google’s CEO unveiled Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) at NRF.  UCP represents a defining moment in the architecture of digital commerce; the strategic imperative is no longer merely about organizing the world’s information but about organizing the world’s commercial intent and empowering merchants to leverage their own data to construct superior customer experiences.  This shift is not incremental; it is a fundamental re-platforming of the digital economy, where Google is uniquely positioned to serve as the orchestrator within a “virtuous cycle” of interaction among retailers, consumers, and intelligent agents. 

“For many people, discovery is the fun part of shopping. Making a decision is where things get harder. As an indecisive shopper myself, I’m looking forward to the day when agents can help me get from discovery to purchase.

At Google, we’re busy laying the groundwork for this agentic ecosystem to work well. That includes building a common language for these systems and services to talk to each other.

As a next step we are introducing the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), designed for the era of agentic commerce. It was built to meet the needs of retailers AND customers, keeping the full customer relationship front and center — from the moments of discovery to decision and beyond”. – Sundar Pichai NRF – Jan 11 2026

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