Bank of America’s CEO Brian Moyniham is mulling the launch of a stablecoin if regulators allow it. He spoke about it yesterday during an interview with David Rubenstein.
While around 30 banks worldwide are issuing or exploring stablecoins, banks tend to discuss tokenized deposits more.
The Trump administration’s embrace of crypto and stablecoins is changing the narrative. What’s notable about the Bank of America, is it has been the least active in the blockchain arena compared to its American peers.
That might mean it has less tokenized deposit baggage and is more willing to lean into stablecoins.
Here’s what Mr Moyniham had to say:
“You have to think about three parts of this dialogue. There’s a blockchain question. There’s the stablecoin type of currency question. And then there’s the Bitcoin and other types of things. It’s pretty clear there’s going to be a stablecoin which is going to be a fully dollar backed type of thing which is no different than a money market fund with check access. Is no different than a bank account really.”
“And so if they make that legal, we’ll go into that business. So you’ll have a Bank of America coin and a Bank of America US dollar deposit and we’ll be able to move them back and forth. Because (until) now it hasn’t been legal for us to do it, but it’s just then like another foreign currency. The question of what it’s useful for is going to be interesting.”
Crypto de-banking
There’s been a lot of discussion about crypto firms being de-banked, with the FDIC releasing communications supporting this narrative, and the new FDIC chair reassessing that position. Mr Moyniham addressed the topic, saying regulators required banks to get permission to deal with crypto operating firms, and that permission was never forthcoming.
His discussion on that point is below (full video here).
Ledger Insights Research has published a report on bank-issued stablecoins and tokenized deposits featuring more than 70 projects. Find out more here.
