Even for Jamie Dimon, the banking mogul known for not mincing words, it came as a surprise when he described a colleague in the financial world as “full of s***.”
“No one is going to bow down to this guy or this company,” Dimon told Fox Business last week. “This guy” is Brian Armstrong, and “this company” is cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.
The tension between Dimon and Armstrong is nothing new, but it is exploding publicly as the Senate approaches a full vote on the cryptocurrency industry’s number one legislative priority, known as the Clarity Act.
Dimon, a longtime skeptic of cryptocurrencies, broadly supports regulating the sector but disagrees with a provision in the Clarity Act that would allow companies like Coinbase to “effectively pay interest on deposits… without the protections they should have.”
The scathing comment about Armstrong came after Dimon listed other concerns about the Clarity Act, including what he considers insufficient anti-money laundering and “know your customer” measures — safeguards that banks have already had in place for decades.
Shortly after Dimon’s “full of s***” moment went viral on social media, Armstrong responded on X, posting an apparently AI-generated meme titled “Fierce Rivalry,” depicting himself and Dimon as hockey players.
On Wednesday, he told Politico he was “stunned” by Dimon’s rebuke of the bill that Armstrong believes will ultimately be “good for the banks.”
“I have a lot of respect for Jamie Dimon, so it was a little sad to hear,” Armstrong said.
In a statement to CNN, Coinbase’s director of policy, Faryar Shirzad, stated that “at the end of the day, we all share the same goal: improving the financial lives of Americans”.
The Clarity Act is causing unrest both on Wall Street and among consumer advocates because of its promise to more deeply integrate cryptocurrencies — a historically autonomous financial system prone to breathtaking ups and downs — into the fabric of the traditional financial system.
“This is not just a cryptocurrency issue, but a broad deregulation of our securities markets,” said Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University who specializes in banking and cryptocurrencies, in an interview. And this should worry everyone, says Allen, even if they don’t have any investment, because “if there is a financial crisis in this sector… no one will come out unscathed”.
What is the Clarity Act?
The legislation was drafted in 2025 to resolve a long-running dispute over which regulatory body should oversee digital assets such as bitcoin or stablecoins.
For years, the cryptocurrency industry has argued that it cannot be regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission — the investment world’s default regulatory body — because its innovative technology is fundamentally at odds with the agency’s 90-year-old regulation. (Critics, including some lawmakers, regulators, and consumer advocates, argue that this argument is just an attempt to bypass the rules that everyone else follows and create a customized framework that imposes virtually no limits on cryptocurrency companies.)
In 2022, lawmakers introduced the Digital Asset Consumer Protection Act, known on Capitol Hill at the time as “Sam’s bill” or “SBF” bill, in reference to its main supporter, Sam Bankman-Fried. Perhaps it’s no surprise that lawmakers lost interest in this legislation in late 2022 when Bankman-Fried’s FTX trading platform collapsed.
The Clarity Act returns to a fundamental objective of the previous initiative: ensuring that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and not the SEC, is responsible for regulating most cryptocurrency markets. Earlier this year, Bankman-Fried, who is serving a 25-year prison sentence for fraud and conspiracy, tweeted through a representative his support for the Clarity Act, calling it a “huge milestone” for the cryptocurrency industry.
The Clarity Act is billed as “comprehensive market structure legislation that establishes a clear regulatory framework for digital assets,” according to Republican supporters on the Senate Banking Committee.
Which, in technical terms, means it allows cryptocurrency companies to finally operate in compliance with US rules, rather than continuing to do what they’ve been doing — essentially conducting their business amid a patchwork of gray areas in state and federal law.
In summary: Clarity aims to create general guidelines for the cryptocurrency industry and establishes the CFTC as the main regulatory body for the industry, rather than the SEC. The bill was approved by the Chamber last year and is expected to be voted on in the Senate plenary in the coming weeks.
Why the banks are furious
Dimon and other banking industry leaders, including the American Banking Association, broadly support the Clarity Act but object to provisions that would effectively allow cryptocurrency companies to act as banks without the consumer protections and regulatory oversight that banks must submit to.
The bill would allow companies in the cryptocurrency sector to offer financial rewards to customers for using stablecoins, a kind of digital replacement for the US dollar. This is very similar to how chartered banks like JPMorgan offer interest-bearing bank accounts.
“If (Armstrong) accepts deposits like a bank, he should follow banking rules,” Dimon said in the Fox Business interview.
Coinbase disputes the idea that it is engaging in bank-like behavior just by accepting customer funds.
“If you have a brokerage account with Charles Schwab, it is regulated differently than a bank account,” Shirzad said in an interview. “If you have a Starbucks card, it is regulated differently than a bank account because they are different products.”
The immediate concern of banks (and many consumer advocates) is that cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase, following in Silicon Valley’s grand tradition of innovation, will entice customers with huge rewards and then phase out those benefits over time.
Deposits at a cryptocurrency exchange are also not federally guaranteed in the same way as bank deposits, but that’s the kind of fine print that customers tend to ignore until it’s too late.
JPMorgan Chase spokeswoman Trish Wexler highlighted that the bank wants the bill to be approved, with some “fixes”, such as banning rewards for holding stablecoins and strengthening anti-money laundering measures.
“Our focus is to inform senators… and hopefully, when the bill reaches the floor, you will start to see some amendments where common sense will prevail.”
Why Consumer Advocates Oppose
Ultimately, both Dimon and Armstrong want the Clarity Act to pass one way or another, and President Donald Trump, whose cryptocurrency portfolio now dwarfs his real estate holdings, has championed the bill.
But there are many opponents. Senator Elizabeth Warren said the bill “declares open season” on cryptocurrency investors by eliminating state fraud protections, while not “lifting a single finger to address the Trump administration’s cryptocurrency-related corruption.”
Many experts are concerned about how the bill would increase everyone’s exposure to cryptocurrencies, regardless of whether they invest in them or not.
“What they are doing is opening the door to greater integration of cryptocurrencies with traditional banks,” said Amanda Fischer, chief operating officer at the nonprofit Better Markets. She notes that FTX’s 2022 implosion was bad for cryptocurrency investors — Bitcoin lost nearly a quarter of its value in two days — but the fallout was largely confined to the digital asset ecosystem.
But as more traditional banks invest in cryptocurrencies under the protection of federal regulation, potential future collapses may not be so limited.
“Our banking system aims to support credit to families and companies”, says Fischer. “Not this casino-like activity.”
