#我在Gate广场过新年 White House 3.1 Final Ultimatum: That night, Wall Street's "Franken-Bank" nightmare comes true

The air on Wall Street is now filled with a strange smell, not the aroma of Starbucks coffee, but the burnt smell of old money. Less than two weeks remain until March 1st—the deadline set by the White House for negotiations on the "Cryptocurrency Market Structure Act."

Just last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent slammed a set of data on the table during a closed-door meeting: the market cap of stablecoins has surpassed $300 billion, and at the current rate, fueled by the GENIUS Act, this number is racing toward $30 trillion. This isn't growth; it's a raid on the core deposit business of traditional banks. At this moment, Wall Street giants are staring at Brian Armstrong (Coinbase CEO) with an innocent smile, almost breaking their pens in frustration.

What if Banks Also Had a "Frankenstein" Phobia
This is no longer the classical era where Bitcoin was just about buying pizza. The battlefield now is "chartering." According to the already enacted GENIUS Act, stablecoins are no longer under the jurisdiction of SEC lawyers who only issue fines but are now overseen by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). This move is ruthless, directly cutting off Wall Street's path of creating "pocket crimes" through the SEC. Even more unsettling for bankers is that the OCC has actually started issuing licenses. Circle, Paxos, Ripple, and even BitGo—once considered makeshift crypto companies—now hold federal trust bank licenses and sit confidently across the negotiation table.

Bank lobbying groups (CSBS and ABA) are already furious. They have invented a highly humiliating term—"Franken-charters." In their view, the OCC is piecing together legal clauses to create a "monster bank" that doesn't need to lend, doesn't bear community responsibility, yet can wildly attract deposits. It is indeed a monster, but one fed by efficiency. Think about it: on one side, traditional banks still rely on T+2 settlement, weekend breaks, and old-fashioned systems; on the other, there are 24/7, second-level settlement, and even on-chain interest-earning smart contracts. If you're capital, who would you choose? The anger of bankers is essentially a panic over their own incompetence. They fear not risk but the secret they've been collecting user fees on for decades being exposed by these tech geeks' code.

Whose Ancestor's Grave Is "Interest" Stirring?
If licensing disputes are about face, then the "Clarity Act" profit rights game is about stripping banks of their last dignity. The current deadlock centers on whether stablecoins can pay interest. Coinbase and the crypto camp's logic is simple and blunt—if I hold dollars on-chain, why can't I earn returns similar to a money market fund? This is called "rewards." But in the eyes of banks, it's outright theft. If users can switch their money to USDC and earn 4%-5% risk-free, who would keep their money in JPMorgan Chase's mere 0.01% savings account? That's why Brian Armstrong and bank representatives are arguing fiercely on Capitol Hill. Banks claim this is "illegal deposit-taking" that could trigger systemic financial risks; meanwhile, the crypto community retorts that banks are protecting their greed-driven interest rate monopoly.

The White House's attitude is now very nuanced. They want crypto votes (remember, midterm elections are coming), but they dare not truly cause a bank run. The so-called March 1 showdown is actually the White House forcing both sides to sign a "ceasefire agreement." But the problem is, nobody wants to share this $30 trillion pie.

The banks' current strategy is clear: if they can't beat them, they join. But the prerequisite for joining is—seal the door tight. They have introduced the so-called "Tokenized Deposits," attempting to use private blockchain walled gardens to counter the wild growth of public chains, trying to tell regulators: only this "censored" version of blockchain is safe.

Georgia's "Strategic Deception" and Shadow Railroads
While Washington's bigwigs are still arguing over a comma in federal law, Georgia has quietly laid the groundwork. Here’s a detail most overlook: Georgia's MALPB (Merchant Acquirer Limited Purpose Bank) license is becoming an underground route for FinTech breakthroughs. Checkout, Stripe, and even Fiserv have already secured access. The cleverest part of this license is that it allows these tech companies to connect directly to Visa and Mastercard's core networks, completely bypassing traditional sponsoring banks as intermediaries. This is a classic "rural encirclement of the city." Although the federal "Clarity Act" is still tangled in disputes, in "Transaction Alley" (Georgia, which handles 70% of global payment transactions), new financial infrastructure has already been laid.

What we see is a layered future: at the bottom are the "tokenized deposits" that banks cling to for large wholesale transactions; in the middle is Georgia's "shadow railroad" for high-frequency commercial payments; and at the top is the stablecoin, the love-hate object for everyone, used for global liquidity transfer. After March 1, regardless of how the law compromises, this three-layer structure is set. For banks, it's an unavoidable defeat; for crypto believers, it's the first time that code truly has the power to rival the old world.