Goldman breaks ranks on crypto bill

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon has endorsed the Clarity Act, the crypto market-structure bill moving through the Senate, putting one of Wall Street's largest banks at odds with most of the industry. "I'm very supportive of moving the Clarity Act forward," Solomon told Politico, calling the bill imperfect but necessary to create "a level playing field."

Where the banks split

Six of the largest banking trade groups, including the American Bankers Association, issued a joint statement this week calling the bill's stablecoin provisions a risk to "the local lending that drives economic activity in the U.S." The Senate Banking Committee already advanced the text 15-9 in May, and the House passed its version in July 2025. The fight now centers on the Tillis-Alsobrooks compromise, which blocks passive yield on idle stablecoin balances but allows narrow activity-based rewards. Community and commercial banks say that carve-out still pulls deposits out of insured accounts. Investment banks like Goldman don't run on consumer deposits, so Solomon's focus sits elsewhere: language letting "regulated institutions that have been on the sidelines participate more actively" in digital assets. Goldman has disclosed a $1.1 billion position in a spot bitcoin ETF and called the funds an "astonishing success."

The split is about balance sheets, not ideology

Goldman's support isn't a crypto conversion story. It's a business-model story. A bank with a trading and asset-management engine wants clean rails to custody, trade, and structure around digital assets. A bank that runs on checking and savings deposits sees stablecoin yield as a leak in its funding base. Jamie Dimon's opposition and Solomon's endorsement aren't contradictory positions on the same industry, they're two banks reading the same bill through different balance sheets. That's why the ethics fight matters less to the outcome than the deposit fight does. Democrats led by Angela Alsobrooks say the bill's limits on federal officials issuing digital assets fall short, and Trump's family has made more than $1 billion from crypto ventures in the past year. That argument could sink the bill on its own, but the deposit-flight objection from senators like John Cornyn and John Curtis cuts across party lines in a way the ethics fight doesn't. Cornyn's line, "Crypto is not going to be loaning any money for small businesses," is a banking argument, not a partisan one, and it's the one Majority Leader John Thune has to solve before any floor vote.

What to watch

Thune wants a vote before the August recess. Whether the stablecoin yield language gets narrowed further to satisfy the ABA, or stays as written and loses Cornyn's and Curtis's votes, decides whether Goldman's backing was enough to counter six trade groups working the other side of the same bill.