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Coinbase’s (COIN) Brian Armstrong was snubbed by top executives from the biggest U.S. banks in Davos: WSJ

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Coinbase's (COIN) Brian Armstrong was snubbed by top executives from the biggest U.S. banks in Davos: WSJ

Coinbase (COIN) CEO Brian Armstrong is running into a wall — and it looks a lot like the heads of America’s biggest banks.

During meetings at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Armstrong reportedly approached several Wall Street leaders to discuss the crypto market structure bill moving through Congress, according to a report the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Thursday.

The reception was icy.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told Armstrong, “You are full of s—,” according to people familiar with the exchange who spoke with the WSJ.

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Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan sat for a 30-minute meeting but dismissed Armstrong’s position, saying, “If you want to be a bank, just be a bank.” Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf refused to engage, saying there was “nothing for them to talk about.” Citigroup’s Jane Fraser gave him under a minute.

The frost comes as Armstrong has turned sharply against the Senate’s crypto bill. After reviewing a draft, he announced on X that Coinbase “can’t support the bill as written.” He later warned that traditional banks were lobbying to protect their turf by targeting stablecoin rewards — recurring payouts to users who hold tokens like USDC.

These rewards function like interest-bearing accounts but typically offer higher yields — up to 3.5%. Banks argue they pose a threat to deposit-based models that fund lending and other core services. If users shift en masse to stablecoins, the impact on local lending and smaller banks could be significant. Armstrong says the answer is simple: compete.

The legislation, known as the CLARITY Act, could determine who gets to offer these products — and under what rules. Its outcome could reset the playing field between banks and crypto platforms.

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Still, the line between the two industries isn’t as sharp as the public standoff suggests. Coinbase maintains partnerships with major banks, including JPMorgan and Citi. That makes the current dispute less about total disruption and more about who sets the terms for the next phase of digital finance.

CoinDesk reached out to Coinbase, JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup for comment but none was received by press time.

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Crypto World

AI Agents Prefer Bitcoin Over Fiat, But Methodology Has Flaws

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AI Agents Prefer Bitcoin Over Fiat, But Methodology Has Flaws

A new study from the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI) suggests that artificial intelligence models prefer Bitcoin over stablecoins and other forms of money for different financial situations, with very few showing a preference for fiat currency. 

The BPI tested 36 models generating more than 9,000 responses, and the AI agents “overwhelmingly chose to use Bitcoin for their economic activity,” the institute said on Tuesday as it released the results of its research. 

The study found that 48.3% of AI models chose to use Bitcoin (BTC) overall, and it was the most selected monetary instrument across all 9,072 responses.

When prompted with scenarios about preserving purchasing power over multi-year horizons, 79.1% of AI responses chose Bitcoin, “the single most lopsided result in the study.”

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However, for payment scenarios, services, micropayments, and cross-border transfers, stablecoins were chosen in 53.2% of responses compared to just 36% for Bitcoin.

Bitwise chief investment officer Jeff Park said that the most obvious explanation for stablecoins not doing better is that they “can be frozen, Bitcoin can’t.”

Almost 91% of responses chose a digitally native instrument such as Bitcoin, stablecoins, altcoins, tokenized real-world assets (RWA), or compute units over traditional fiat. 

“Zero of the 36 models tested chose fiat as their top overall preference, making digital-money convergence one of the most universal findings in the study.” 

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Half of AI agents prefer Bitcoin. Source: Bitcoin Policy Institute

Methodology had limitations

The Bitcoin Policy Institute said the current study was limited to 36 models tested across six providers, and it would look to expand to additional models in the future. 

It also acknowledged that system prompt framing may have influenced the results, adding that “future work will test alternative framings and measure sensitivity.”

This was apparent in some of the “open-ended monetary scenarios” presented to the AI models. 

Related: OpenAI pits AI agents against each other to detect smart contract flaws 

For example, one scenario asked what financial instrument an AI would choose if it were operating across multiple countries with “75,000 units of accumulated earnings” wanting to store them in a way that is “not tied to any single country’s monetary policy or banking system,” which would already rule out fiat currency. 

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BPI also said that the AI models’ preferences do not reflect real-world adoption and that the results instead indicate training data patterns.

The study revealed that Anthropic models averaged a 68% Bitcoin preference, whereas OpenAI models averaged 26%, Google’s 43%, and xAI 39%. 

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