• Seven Republican senators co-sponsor Jerry Moran's SA 6771 stablecoin yield amendment.

• SA 6771 replaces the ‘economically or functionally equivalent' standard with ‘substantially similar'.

• The American Bankers Association pushed to remove the balance-based rewards exception.

Seven GOP Senators Back SA 6771

Stablecoin holders — including anyone earning rewards on networks such as Sui (SUI) — are the population a fresh Senate amendment would reach, and its effect is to narrow what they can be paid. Senator Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican, filed the measure as an amendment to the CLARITY Act, the comprehensive digital-asset market bill now moving through the upper chamber, and more than a dozen lawmakers have since signed on as co-sponsors, half of them Republicans, according to Punchbowl News. The Republican side counts Susan Collins, Cindy Hyde-Smith, John Curtis, John Cornyn, Lisa Murkowski and Josh Hawley; with Moran himself included, seven GOP senators now stand behind the text. Filed in the congressional record as Senate Amendment 6771 (SA 6771), the proposal narrows the range of rewards digital-asset companies may pay to stablecoin holders. The underlying bill barred payouts that are ‘economically or functionally equivalent' to interest on a bank deposit; Moran would replace that wording with the stricter standard ‘substantially similar' to how banks pay interest or returns. He would also delete the word ‘solely' from the clause prohibiting rewards for merely holding a stablecoin, and strike an exception that allowed rewards to be calculated on balance size or holding period. Taken together, the edits lower the threshold for what counts as regulated yield: compensation structured around conditions such as trading volume or service usage, even where it ends up resembling deposit interest, could be swept into scope. For Sui (SUI), a proof-of-stake chain whose stablecoin balances commonly earn returns through lending venues and automated market maker pools, that distinction is direct — the amendment names no blockchain, but yield programs on any network a US digital-asset company touches would sit under the same pen. COINOTAG's guide to how to use Sui maps where those rewards originate.

The banking lobby's fingerprints run across the amendment's language. The American Bankers Association and allied bank groups have argued that the original CLARITY Act left digital-asset companies room to dangle stablecoin rewards under the fig leaf of a transaction or activity, and they pressed for precisely the deletions SA 6771 now carries — above all, removal of the exception for rewards keyed to balance or holding period. The banks' underlying concern is deposit flight: if stablecoins work as deposit substitutes, regional lenders lose the deposit base and the lending capacity built on it. That funding argument is what pushed the payout question to the top of the Senate's crypto agenda. The digital-asset industry reads the same clauses in the opposite direction. Its representatives have cautioned that a broad restriction could reach rewards tied to genuine service use — trading, payments, settlement — and that sweeping rules would restrain competition rather than protect users. Their worry, in plain terms, is that the language could be read to capture almost any incentive a protocol attaches to a stablecoin balance. That collision is why stablecoin yield rules look set to re-emerge as a central bargaining point if and when the bill returns to the Senate floor, and senators on both sides now treat the payout question as one of the last structural disagreements standing between the bill and floor action. For Sui and other ecosystems with active stablecoin economies, the stakes are concrete rather than abstract. Full Sail, a Sui (SUI) DeFi protocol, recently wound down after a $91,000 oracle vault drain, and the sector's reward mechanisms now sit directly inside the argument this amendment would settle. SUI's spot price moved roughly 14% over the past 24 hours as the amendment circulated, a reminder that policy drafts move the token even before any text names the chain.

Where the Yield Ban Stops

The text we are looking at — SA 6771, published in the congressional record — is a proposal, not enacted law: it would amend the CLARITY Act's yield provisions but has passed neither chamber and carries no effective date. As drafted, it binds digital-asset companies — issuers, exchanges and custodians — that pay rewards to stablecoin holders. That is also where the measure stops: conventional deposit interest paid by the banks the American Bankers Association represents sits outside the restriction entirely, the very product the amendment shields from stablecoin competition. The same boundary-drawing echoes the wider policy debate over a central bank digital currency (CBDC), where deposit-like instruments outside the banking system remain the flashpoint.