The US bill CLARITY will make digital dollars non-interest-bearing. Here's what this could mean in practice for you as a user, for builders — and for banks.
CLARITY builds on last year's Genius Act by stating that digital dollars should be fully secured and subject to strict oversight. At the same time, they are not allowed to pay simple, passive returns just to hold them, even when the collateral is in interest-bearing assets such as US government securities. The returns these assets generate must instead stay with the banks and in US government bonds, or be repackaged into proprietary products such as tokenized funds and DeFi strategies - not show up as “interest” on the digital dollar itself
If CLARITY is enacted roughly as the bill currently stands, platforms regulated in the United States will not be able to pay simple, passive interest on digital dollars, even if the tokens are secured by interest-bearing assets. Users will still be able to receive activity-based rewards — for payments, card use or trading — and can earn returns through tokenized funds or DeFi protocols. But the simple product “hold dollar, get interest” on a major US stock exchange is in practice disappearing from the menu
This forces a clearer choice: Either treat digital dollars as safe, non‑interest-bearing digital cash within the regulated area, or go into more complex wrappers and protocols if returns on dollar holdings are important to you as a user.
In practice, digital dollars are defined by law as something you use for payments, not as a savings account: The returns lie upstream in banks and U.S. government securities, or in their own, regulated wrappers -- not on the token itself. This pushes innovators towards tokenized money market funds, T‑bill products and onchain credit markets alongside the digital dollars, forcing a choice between accepting a Clarity regime or betting on other jurisdictions and frameworks.
This favors teams that can operate comfortably within a securities and funds regulatory environment, with clear risk information and solid investor documentation, while making it more difficult to offer simple “interest-on-cash” products linked directly to digital dollars in the United States.
Together, GENIUS and CLARITY deliver much of what banks and regulators have wanted. They provide safer, fully secured payment tokens that plug right into anti-money laundering and monitoring regimes, without undermining the economics of deposit funding. That could reduce the risk of another FTX‑like collapse in the short term. At the same time, it cements a world in which ordinary users do not receive interest-bearing digital dollars, while traditional finance captures the underlying income.
For a deeper review you can read Our main focus on CLARITY!, which follows how GENIUS, lobbying from US banks and input from the industry have driven the bill forward to the current belated situation.
