The crypto CEO who’s become enemy no. 1 on Wall Street

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Brian Armstrong, CEO of the biggest U.S. crypto company, was having coffee with former U.K.

prime minister Tony Blair at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week when JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon cut in. “You are full of s—," said Dimon, a longtime crypto skeptic who previously called bitcoin a fraud, his index finger pointed squarely at Armstrong’s face. Dimon, in a nutshell, told him to stop lying on TV, according to people familiar with the conversation.

​In appearances on business-television programs earlier that week, Armstrong had accused banks of trying to sabotage legislation that would set a new regulatory framework for digital assets. The confrontation wasn’t quite in line with the annual forum’s mission to foster cooperation among global leaders. As crypto moves swiftly into the mainstream of American finance, some of Wall Street’s heavyweights are waking up to the threat.

While banks have embraced some aspects of crypto—helping people invest in bitcoin and using digital assets to make money transfers more efficient—they are drawing a line at encroachment on their core business: consumer deposits. Banks and Coinbase are at odds over whether crypto exchanges should be allowed to offer consumers regular payouts for holding digital tokens. These so-called rewards would pay holders of stablecoins a recurring fee, say 3.5%.

Stablecoins are digital assets pegged to real-world currency like dollars. Banks say the payouts are effectively the same as the interest on bank accounts, and since banks offer much less yield—typically under 0.1% in a checking account—they worry that the upshot will be that consumers will shift their money in droves into crypto. That, they say, will