New York
Even for Jamie Dimon, the banking titan who’s not known to mince words, it was a surprising shot across the bow when he described a fellow financier as “full of sh*t.”
“No one’s gonna bow down to this guy or that company,” Dimon told Fox Business last week. “This guy” being Brian Armstrong, and “that company” being cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.
The Dimon-Armstrong tension isn’t new, but it is boiling over publicly as the Senate inches closer to a floor vote on the crypto industry’s No. 1 legislative priority, known as the Clarity Act.
Dimon, a longtime crypto skeptic, broadly supports crypto regulation but takes issue with a provision in the Clarity Act that would allow companies like Coinbase to “effectively pay interest on deposits… without the protection they should have.”
The spicy comment about Armstrong came after Dimon rattled off other concerns about the Clarity Act, including what he sees as its insufficient anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer safeguards that banks have had in place for decades.
Shortly after Dimon’s “full of sh*t” moment made the rounds on social media, Armstrong responded on X, posting an apparently AI-generated “Heated Rivalry” meme depicting himself and Dimon as hockey players. On Wednesday, he told Politico that he was “perplexed” by Dimon’s rebuke over the bill that Armstrong believes will ultimately be “good for the banks.”
“I’ve got a lot of respect for Jamie Dimon, so it was kind of sad to hear that,” Armstrong said.
In a statement to CNN, Coinbase’s chief policy officer, Faryar Shirzad, said that “at the end of the day, we all share the same goal: improving the financial lives of Americans.”
The Clarity Act is rattling Wall Street and consumer advocates alike because of its promise to weave crypto — a historically self-contained financial system prone to stomach-churning booms and busts — more fully into the machinery of traditional finance.
“It’s not just a crypto story, it’s a broad deregulation of our securities markets story,” Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University who specializes in banking and cryptocurrency, said in an interview. And that should concern everyone, Allen says, even if they have no investments at all, because “if we get a financial crisis in this space… no one comes out of that unscathed.”
The legislation was drafted in 2025 to settle a long-running turf war over which regulatory body should oversee digital assets, like bitcoin or stablecoins.
For years, the crypto industry has argued that it can’t be regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission — the default watchdog for the investing world — because its novel technology is fundamentally at odds with the agency’s 90-year-old rulebook. (Critics, including some lawmakers, regulators and consumer advocates, say that argument is just an attempt to bypass the rules everyone else plays by and craft a custom framework that puts almost no limits on crypto companies.)
In 2022, lawmakers introduced the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act, known on Capitol Hill at the time as “Sam’s bill,” or the “SBF” bill after its most prominent backer, Sam Bankman-Fried. Perhaps unsurprisingly, lawmakers lost interest in that legislation in late 2022 when Bankman-Fried’s FTX trading platform collapsed.
The Clarity Act revives a key goal of the earlier effort: to ensure thatthe Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and not the SEC, is in charge of regulating the bulk of crypto markets. Earlier this year, Bankman-Fried, who is serving a 25-year prison sentence for fraud and conspiracy, tweeted via a proxy his support for the Clarity Act, calling it a “huge milestone” for crypto.
The Clarity Act is billed as “comprehensive market structure legislation that establishes a clear regulatory framework for digital assets,” according to Republican backers on the Senate Banking Committee.
Which is the technical way of saying it allows crypto companies to operate, at long last, in compliance with US rules, rather than what they have been doing — essentially running their businesses within a patchwork of state and federal legal gray areas.
In short: Clarity aims to create broad rules of the road for crypto and establishes the CFTC as the primary industry regulator, rather than the SEC. The bill cleared the House last year and is expected to receive a floor vote in the Senate in the coming weeks.
Dimon and other banking leaders, including the American Banking Association, broadly support the Clarity Act, but they take issue with provisions that would effectively allow crypto companies to act like banks without the consumer protections and regulatory oversight that banks must adhere to.
The bill would allow crypto firms to offer financial rewards to customers for using stablecoins, a kind of digital proxy for US dollars. Which sounds a lot like how chartered banks, such as JPMorgan, offer interest-bearing bank accounts.
“If (Armstrong) takes deposits like a bank, he should have bank rules,” Dimon said in the Fox Business interview.
Coinbase disputes the idea that it is engaging in bank-like behavior just because it accepts customer funds.
“If you have a brokerage account at Charles Schwab, that’s regulated differently than a bank account is,” Shirzad said in an interview. “If you have a Starbucks card, that’s regulated differently than a bank account because they’re different products.”
The immediate concern from banks (and many consumer advocates) is that crypto exchanges like Coinbase would, in the grand tradition of Silicon Valley innovation, lure customers in with huge rewards and then phase those benefits out over time.
Deposits in a crypto exchange are also not insured by the federal government the way bank deposits are, but that’s the kind of fine print that customers tend to overlook until it’s too late.
JPMorgan Chase spokesperson Trish Wexler underscored that the bank wants the bill to pass, with some “fixes,” like prohibiting rewards on stablecoin holdings and strengthening anti-money-laundering guardrails.
“Our focus is on educating the senators… and hopefully when it gets to the floor, you’re going to start to see some amendments where rational heads will prevail.”
Ultimately, both Dimon and Armstrong want to see the Clarity Act passed in one form or another, and President Donald Trump, whose crypto portfolio now eclipses his real estate holdings, has championed the bill.
But opponents abound. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has said that the bill “declares open season” on crypto investors by wiping out state-level protections against fraud, while failing to “lift even the tiniest finger to address the Trump Administration’s crypto-related corruption.”
Many experts are concerned about the way the bill would increase everyone’s exposure to crypto, whether they invest in it or not.
“What they’re doing is opening the door to getting crypto more integrated with mainstream banks,” said Amanda Fischer, chief operating officer for the nonprofit Better Markets. She notes that the FTX implosion of 2022 was bad for crypto investors — Bitcoin lost nearly a quarter of its value in the span of two days — but the fallout was largely contained within the digital asset ecosystem.
But as more traditional banks invest in crypto under the halo of federal regulation, future blow-ups may not stay so confined.
“Our banking system is meant to support lending to households and businesses,” Fischer says. “Not this casino-like activity.”
