A comment in Fortune states that American community banks may not necessarily need to issue their own stablecoins. However, if they are unable to allow customers to use digital dollars, cross-border payments, and new types of settlement tools within their existing banking relationships, what they may lose in the future are high-frequency business areas such as payments, foreign exchange, merchant services, and fund management, rather than just deposits themselves.

Deposit pressure is not yet a reality.

The article points out that the competitive pressure faced by small banks has existed long before the rise of stablecoins. Customers have been consistently shifting to larger banks that offer a better user experience, faster payments, and more comprehensive corporate services. A report from April 2025 stated that banks with assets of less than $10 billion held a total of about $2.5 trillion in assets, a figure that has not changed significantly over the past few decades, while large banks have expanded markedly during the same period. Better Markets

The Bankers Association of America once cited estimates from the Treasury Department's Borrowing Advisory Committee, stating that theoretically, up to $6.6 trillion in transactional deposits could be at risk of migrating to stablecoins, and urged Congress to tighten what it referred to as the "yield gap" in stablecoins. However, the article argues that this figure represents the potential exposure level, not the actual amount of funds that have already flowed out.

The data cited in the text indicates that from June 2019 to March 2026, community bank deposits actually increased by about 26%, with an increment of approximately 482 billion US dollars. CRA International Independent research by the President's Economic Advisory Council also did not find a significant statistical relationship between the growth of stablecoins and the outflow of community bank deposits.

Customer access may be directed to external platforms.

The article argues that a more realistic risk for community banks is that customers keep their balances with the banks, but entrust payments, foreign exchange services, merchant acquiring, and financial management to other platforms. As a result, external platforms gain access to transaction data, transaction fee revenues, and daily interactions with customers, while banks are left with only the function of holding funds.

This change has already emerged among the new generation of corporate customers. The article mentions that the fintech platform Mercury indicates that it serves over 300,000 enterprises and individuals. If a startup establishes its payment and financial processes on a fintech platform from the very beginning, the cost of migrating related systems when it grows into a large enterprise in the future would be very high. For community banks, the issue may not necessarily be customer loss, but rather that customers never enter their system in the first place.

Stablecoins and tokenized deposits can coexist.

The article argues that both stablecoins and tokenized deposits can help small banks in acquiring customer relationships, but the problems they address are not the same. Stablecoins are more suitable for widespread connections within open blockchain networks, especially in cross-border payment scenarios; tokenized deposits, on the other hand, retain the attributes of bank liabilities while providing faster settlement and software-based control within the network.

The author argues that these two options should not be seen as a binary choice. For community banks, a more realistic approach is not to build a blockchain from scratch, but rather to acquire the necessary infrastructure or collaborate with external institutions. This way, they can continue to maintain control over key aspects such as compliance, liquidity, lending, data management, and payment routing, and can integrate stablecoins or tokenized deposit networks in suitable scenarios.

Additional information:The article also mentions that after the US Congress passed GENIUS Act, the federal regulatory framework for payment stablecoins has become clearer, and banks now have a more definite basis for making decisions regarding partners, service scope, and risk management. At the same time, traditional payment networks will continue to play their role. Nacha data shows that the ACH network processed 33.6 billion payments in 2024, with a total amount of 86.2 trillion dollars.