At the end of August in Abbeville, SpaceX confirmed what half the state had been whispering about for months: a $100 billion Starship spaceport in Vermilion Parish, with as many as 10,000 permanent jobs. State officials called it the largest capital investment in Louisiana history, and for once that is not press release inflation. It is also not alone. Meta has committed more than $50 billion to its Richland Parish data center, and Hyundai Steel is putting $5.8 billion into a Donaldsonville mill that brings 1,300 jobs at an average salary of $95,000.

So here is the question nobody was asking in Abbeville. When the money lands, who in Louisiana gets to touch it? A spaceport does not build itself. These projects run on hundreds of small Louisiana companies doing dirt work, welding, concrete, pipe, trucking, staffing, and equipment rental. Meta has already written more than $1.6 billion in contracts to Louisiana businesses since breaking ground in Richland Parish. That is the part that stays here after the ribbon gets cut.

But winning that work requires upfront capital. A contractor cannot bid a job at SpaceX scale without expanding first. He buys the excavator before the first invoice, hires the crew before the first draw, and floats payroll for ninety days while a general contractor pushes paperwork. That takes a loan, and in Louisiana it almost always comes from a community bank.

There are 511,235 small businesses in this state, 99.5 percent of all Louisiana businesses, employing 54 percent of the workforce. The big national banks turn most of them down. Community banks say yes at far higher rates, because a banker in Rayville or Abbeville underwrites the man across the desk instead of a credit model built in Manhattan.

Nationally, community banks make roughly 60 percent of small business loans and 80 percent of agricultural lending. In a state of small contractors and family farms, that is the whole ballgame.

Which brings us to the CLARITY Act. The Senate returns on September 14, and the next afternoon will hold a procedural vote on whether to even begin debating the crypto market-structure bill. Three fights remain unsettled: ethics rules on officials profiting from crypto, illicit finance provisions, and stablecoin rewards. The first is a Washington story. The other two are Louisiana’s fight, and one of them is the one almost nobody is talking about.

Start with illicit finance, because it is not a side issue. Digital asset platforms that operate outside the examination and reporting regime banks live under are not just a competitive problem; they are a national security one. Money laundering, sanctions evasion, and terror financing all move faster through venues that were never built to flag them. Every exemption carved into this bill is also a gap in the perimeter, and closing that gap should not be optional in exchange for a faster path to market.

The other fight, on stablecoin rewards, is Louisiana’s fight in a different way, and it runs on the same logic. Last year’s GENIUS Act banned stablecoin issuers from paying interest to people holding their tokens. Sensible enough, except the ban applies only to issuers. Crypto exchanges and their affiliated platforms are not issuers, so they hand the money to the customer themselves and call it a “reward.” A compromise brokered by Senators Thom Tillis and Angela Alsobrooks was supposed to close that.

Instead, it bars rewards for merely holding a stablecoin while permitting rewards tied to a customer’s “transaction, payment activity, or other activity.” The American Bankers Association notes that as drafted, an exchange can pay yield through a membership program and stay inside the lines. Five banking trade groups reviewed it and said plainly that it falls short. A ban with a hole that size is a permission slip.

Rajesh Narayanan, an LSU finance professor who has spent his career studying banks, wrote in July that Congress should reject this bill as written. His objection is not that it regulates crypto. It is that the bill hands out exemptions, and an exemption is just a company dodging rules everybody else in the industry has to follow. That produces a two-tier market where regulated firms bear the costs and exempt firms reap the benefits. It is the same two-tier problem investors face on the other side of this bill: a retail investor putting money into a tokenized asset is trusting it comes with the same basic protections as a stock or bond, and in key respects the bill does not guarantee that. Fewer disclosure requirements and weaker oversight are not a feature for the person on the other end of the trade, they are the risk.

He has also explained the sleight of hand better than anyone, without a single equation. Credit card rewards (though incorrectly compared to these crypto rewards) are funded by swipe fees and are paid to get you to spend. You earn points for using the card.

Stablecoin “rewards” work nothing like that. The platform takes the cash backing your tokens, invests it in Treasury bills earning about 4.5 percent, and passes the interest back to you for doing nothing. You are paid for holding, not for using. It is interest on a deposit wearing a costume.

That distinction matters beyond the stablecoin fight itself. Some senators have leaned on the surface resemblance between the two kinds of “rewards” to justify tacking the long-stalled Durbin-Marshall Credit Card Competition Act onto CLARITY, most recently when Senators Lummis and Moreno signed on to it in the middle of this summer’s yield negotiations. The CCCA has nothing to do with digital asset market structure. It caps swipe fees and mandates credit card routing. But if stablecoin “rewards” and credit card rewards were actually the same animal, needing the same fix, dragging one into a bill about the other might at least make some sense. They are not the same animal, which is exactly why the amendment is not germane. It is a separate fight over a separate fee, hitching a ride on the confusion.

It is also, Narayanan has separately pointed out, another bill that hits community banks hardest despite claiming to spare them. The CCCA exempts banks under $100 billion in assets from its fee cap, but the routing mandate applies to everyone.

We have already tried this before. When the 2010 Durbin Amendment did the same thing on debit cards, exempt community banks still lost 30 percent of their interchange revenue, because merchants route to whichever network is cheapest and that pressure drags every bank’s rates down, exemption or not. Community banks lean on that interchange income to subsidize the relationship lending that a spreadsheet-driven credit model will never approve.

We have run a similar experiment to the stablecoin loophole before too. In the 1970s, federal rules capped what banks could pay depositors while Treasury yields ran into double digits. Money market funds filled that gap, deposits drained from smaller banks, and the wreckage included the savings-and-loan collapse and the farm credit crisis.

Squeeze it twice, once through a stablecoin loophole draining deposits and once through a swipe-fee mandate draining interchange, and Louisiana’s small business lenders take the hit from both directions at once.

And the money does not come back. The largest stablecoin issuers park reserves in Treasuries rather than redepositing at banks, which is why Standard Chartered estimates roughly $500 billion could drain out of American banks by the end of 2028, with regional and community lenders most exposed.

When a depositor in Winnsboro moves $100,000, it leaves the state.

The timing could not be worse. Meta’s construction runs through 2030, Hyundai breaks ground this quarter, and SpaceX starts building in 2027. Louisiana’s peak demand for small business credit arrives in exactly the years this loophole would be draining the deposits that fund it.

The industry says banks just want protection from competition, but nobody is asking Congress to ban stablecoins! The ask is narrower than that: the same rules for the same risks, whether the money sits in a bank or a token, and real protection for the people and institutions this ban is supposed to cover.

The question is whether a company gets to run a savings account, and in some cases a shadow brokerage, without the capital, the examinations, the deposit insurance, the investor safeguards, or any obligation to lend a dime back into the community it took the money from.

Our Louisiana senators should oppose this bill unless the interest loophole is fixed, the illicit finance provisions are strengthened, and investors get protections on par with the rest of the regulated market. The fix on rewards is not complicated: apply the ban on interest to every entity in the chain instead of just the issuer, and narrow “other activity” to rewards actually tied to using the thing. If the Senate amends it, the bill returns to the House, where Louisiana holds the Speaker’s gavel and the Majority Leader’s office. This is the best way to protect Louisiana small business access to capital, and Louisiana investors, at this crucial time.

We spent a generation watching capital go to Texas and Tennessee. It is finally coming here. It would be a hell of a thing to land the plant and then find out the local guys could not get a loan to bid the work, or that the money they did put aside wasn’t as safe as they were told.