XWIN Japan2026-05-12

CLARITY Draft Signals a New Era for Stablecoins and Bitcoin

CryptoQuant’s “All Stablecoins (ERC20): Active Addresses” chart shows a sharp rise in stablecoin usage since late 2025, with active addresses briefly approaching 600,000 in 2026. This suggests not only higher supply, but also rapid growth in real on-chain dollar usage. The recently released U.S. Senate Banking Committee draft of the CLARITY Act appears to draw a clear legal distinction between “payment stablecoins” and “yield-bearing stablecoin products.” Under the already-passed GENIUS framework, issuers cannot pay interest simply for holding stablecoins. The new CLARITY draft expands those restrictions to exchanges, custodians, brokers, and wallet providers, targeting deposit-like APY services such as “earn 3–5% just by holding USDC.” Importantly, the bill does not appear to ban stablecoins or DeFi itself. Instead, it seems designed to formalize stablecoins as regulated payment infrastructure while preventing them from functioning like bank deposits. Rewards tied to actual activity — liquidity provision, staking, governance participation, or collateralized lending — may still remain permissible under certain conditions. The law’s structure also suggests that decentralized protocols and some self-custody activities are not the primary targets. Rather, the focus is on centralized intermediaries offering bank-like yield products. This shift could accelerate the growth of tokenized U.S. Treasuries, RWA products, and on-chain financial infrastructure. Since stablecoins represent the core dollar liquidity layer of crypto markets, expanding usage may ultimately strengthen long-term capital flows into Bitcoin as well.