Coinbase warns stablecoin interest ban in United States could boost China

In a post on X on 30 December 2025, Shirzad argued that the debate over whether stablecoin holders can receive yield has taken on added urgency after the People’s Bank of China said commercial banks will be permitted to pay interest on e-CNY balances. The change is scheduled to take effect on 1 January 2026 under a new framework aimed at boosting adoption of the digital yuan after several years of pilots.

The PBOC has described the policy shift as a move from treating the e-CNY as digital cash toward a “digital deposit currency” model. Deputy Governor Lu Lei said the change is intended to make the product more attractive to users and better integrated into the banking system.

In the United States, the GENIUS Act, signed into law in July, bars issuers of U.S. dollar payment stablecoins from paying interest or yield directly to holders, an approach lawmakers have framed as keeping stablecoins focused on payments. The current dispute has centered on how the ban should be interpreted and whether related incentives offered through exchanges, intermediaries, or other structures should also be treated as prohibited yield.

On 18 December 2025, the Blockchain Association and more than 125 industry participants urged Congress not to broaden the GENIUS Act’s interest restriction, saying claims that stablecoin rewards threaten community banks are not supported by evidence. The American Bankers Association sent a separate letter the same day calling for strict enforcement, arguing that reward-like incentives could draw activity away from traditional deposits and lending.

Shirzad warned that a broad prohibition on stablecoin rewards in ongoing Senate negotiations over digital-asset market structure could make U.S. stablecoins less competitive versus non-U.S. stablecoins and government-backed digital currencies, including China’s e-CNY, as jurisdictions experiment with interest-bearing models for digital money.

As GNcrypto reported on 30 December 2025, onchain investigator ZachXBT said a scammer posing as Coinbase customer support may have taken more than $2 million from users over the past year through social engineering rather than a software exploit, and linked multiple incidents to what he described as a Canadian suspect by comparing Telegram chat screenshots, social posts and wallet activity. ZachXBT also cited a leaked call video showing an impersonator pressuring a victim to act, and claimed the suspect attempted to hide by cycling Telegram handles and deleting older accounts, while he declined to publish an address he said he identified using open source information.