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 get the market structure done, ASAP. Americans should get more bang for their buck,” Trump said in the post Tuesday. “The banks are hitting record profits and we will not allow them to undermine our powerful Crypto agenda that will end up going to China and other countries if we don’t get The Clarity Act done.”
Politico first reported the meeting between Armstrong and Trump. Afterward, the president publicly supported Coinbase’s “position in [the] ongoing lobbying clashes with banks that have derailed a major cryptocurrency bill.”
The news outlet cited “two people with knowledge of the matter, who were granted anonymity to discuss a closed-door matter” as the source of the meeting between Trump and Armstrong. It also said it was unclear what the two discussed during the meeting.
But it reiterated, “it came just before Trump wrote on social media that banks ‘must make a good deal with the crypto industry’ to advance digital asset legislation that has stalled on Capitol Hill.”
The White House and Coinbase did not respond to a CoinDesk request for comment.
The market structure bill has been stalled since Senate Banking Committee lawmakers were set to debate and vote on it. The point of withholding the adoption of the crypto bill is that banks claim that stablecoin interest rates can affect bank deposits and therefore especially their ability to lend. Crypto exchanges say individuals should be able to earn rewards on their stablecoin holdings, which they say the GENIUS Act allows.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said on Tuesday that stablecoin issuers that pay interest on customer balances should be regulated like banks. Patrick Witt, the executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors on Digital Assets, pushed back at Dimon, saying that “the fraud here is that it is not the payment of returns on a balance sheet per se that necessitates bank-like regulations, but rather the lending or rehypothecation of dollars that make up the underlying balance sheet.” Witt also said the GENIUS Act “explicitly prohibits stablecoin issuers from doing the latter. Stablecoins ≠ Deposits.”
Crypto-related stocks, including COIN, jumped on Wednesday amid a broader rally in crypto prices. COIN climbed above $200, seeing its highest price since late January.
