As the Senate muddles through a vote-a-rama on Trump’s request for spending rescissions, the House is running into trouble of its own. This “crypto week,” as leadership calls it, Republicans are trying to advance a trio of cryptocurrency-related bills.
Unfortunately, they are currently scrambling for the votes to simply begin consideration of the legislation due to a standoff between the committee leaders who put them together and hard-line members who have demands of their own.
Here are the three bills that Speaker Johnson is trying to get passed:
- GENIUS Act: Passed by the Senate with bipartisan support last month, the bill would create a new light-touch regulatory framework for stablecoins — cryptocurrencies that are backed by traditional assets to maintain a stable value. It would allow issuers of stablecoins with under $10 billion in market value to choose between state or federal oversight. The GENIUS Act takes a more free-market approach than competing legislation, the STABLE Act, which originated in the House. That alternative bill would have mandated strict federal oversight of all stablecoins, allowed a smaller pool of companies to issue them, and required them to be insured by the FDIC as though they were banks.
- CLARITY Act: Similar to the GENIUS Act, this bill would establish a regulatory framework for all cryptocurrencies, rather than only stablecoins. Two federal agencies, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) have been arguing for years over which of their jurisdictions crypto falls under. This dispute has generated regulatory uncertainty for crypto issuers who want Congress to establish clear rules of the road. The CLARITY Act would fill that need by assigning different responsibilities to the SEC and CFTC based on the type of digital asset.
- Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act: The most contentious of the three by far, this bill would restrict the Federal Reserve, the country’s central bank, from offering financial products and services to everyday Americans. Most importantly, it would prohibit the creation of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) — a digital version of the dollar that could, in theory, replace physical cash. Through such an asset, households and businesses could potentially hold digital wallets, or accounts, with the Fed. This bill is a top priority of conservative hard-liners in the House, who fear that a CBDC could obliterate financial privacy by giving the federal government direct control over individual transactions. A CBDC would also compete with retail banks, Republicans argue, potentially crowding out the private sector’s role in our financial system.
For conservatives who favor a diverse private marketplace of financial services, all three of these bills are worth passing into law. What is the holdup, then? As Politico reports, some hard-line House members are demanding that the anti-CBDC bill — sponsored exclusively by Republicans — be packaged with the bipartisan GENIUS Act and CLARITY Act to improve its odds of passing both chambers of Congress. While the committee leaders who put together the crypto bills also support the anti-CBDC bill as distinct legislation, they worry that combining the bills would doom them all to fail.
For the past few hours, the two sides have been in a closed-door meeting in Speaker Johnson’s office. If Republicans can’t get on the same page, this so-called crypto week will end up being a major disappointment to the nascent industry it was supposed to relieve.