White House crypto advisor fires back at banking lobby over stablecoin deposit flight fears

Patrick Witt, the Executive Director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets, is picking a very public fight with the banking industry. His target: the claim that allowing yields on payment stablecoins would trigger a catastrophic exodus of deposits from traditional banks. Witt’s argument, laid out across a series of posts on X, boils down to a simple observation. The banking sector’s position on stablecoin yields is riddled with contradictions, and the doomsday scenarios they’re painting don’t match what’s actually happened in the market. The 134-executive letter and the logic gap The flashpoint in this debate arrived in July 2026, when 134 banking executives collectively signed a letter pushing for stricter measures against stablecoin yields. Their core concern: that yield-bearing stablecoins could siphon deposits away from banks, reducing the pool of funds available for consumer and business lending. The executives cited potential outflows ranging from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars. That’s a wide range, which Witt apparently noticed. He described the banking lobby’s motivations as stemming from either “greed or ignorance.” The White House advisor...