The House Ways and Means Committee circulated seven draft bills ahead of this week’s hearing on crypto tax policy, signaling what the industry can expect.
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The narrative
The House Ways and Means Committee is the group of lawmakers tasked with writing laws that regulate taxes. While we’ve already seen draft bills dealing with taxes, it’s this committee that’s really going to handle a lot of the work of drafting crypto-tax legislation and guiding it through the legislative process.
Why it matters
The fact that the committee is discussing draft legislation in a hearing shows progress on this front, and it is likely that the provisions will eventually become law in the coming years, either as part of a tax-specific legislative package or as part of another, broader bill.
To break it down
Staking and mining, de minimis and stablecoin transactions are all covered in the draft bill circulated late Thursday by the House Ways and Means Committee, among various other issues.
It is unclear how much progress will be made in actually turning these bills into law in the 2026 calendar year. The House — and the Senate, for that matter — have a number of other priorities that are more advanced and require floor time, which CoinDesk has covered before. Still, the existence of the draft laws and a hearing are important steps.
Alison Mangiero, head of industry affairs and US policy at the Crypto Council for Innovation, an industry trade group, said in a statement that the group of bills was an “important first step.”
“The Ways & Means Committee’s decision to release seven bills and pursue a full legislative hearing in committee on June 9 is significant for procedural reasons alone,” she said. “This format, where members work through specific legislation with expert witnesses before any marking, is one that the committee has not used in years. That kind of deliberate, structured engagement represents the unique focus of the committee on this important work.”
Mangiero called the bills the third leg of crypto-law’s metaphorical three-legged stool, with the other legs including the stablecoin-focused GENIUS Act and the market structure-focused Clarity Act (the latter of which, as we all know, is still elbow-deep in the legislative process).
“Several provisions in this package reflect priorities that we have long promoted: sensible tax treatment of GENIUS-compliant stablecoins that allows them to function as the payment instruments that they are; a de minimis exemption for routine network transaction fees, a relief that we have long advocated and believe should be further expanded as the process continues; parity provisions that expand the digital-to-market deduction for securities and trading market treatment.” assets; and clear rules for mining taxation and stake rewards,” she said.
In semi-related news, the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s Investor Advisory Committee also met late last month to discuss, among other things, whether stablecoins qualify to be treated as cash equivalents.
The committee believes there needs to be a “high threshold” to establish something like liquidity, according to a summary of the meeting shared with CoinDesk. Committee members did not agree on what kind of information would be useful to investors.
Any disclosure information includes how reserves are structured, the type of stablecoin, who the issuer is, where the funds are held, disaggregated information about liquid holdings and currency risk, and even whether published information was made on an interim basis.
The committee will meet again in November.
Tuesday
- 18:00 UTC (14:00 ET): The House Ways and Means Committee holds a hearing to discuss crypto tax policy.
If you have thoughts or questions about what I’ll be discussing next week or any feedback you’d like to share, feel free to email me at [email protected] or find me at Bluesky @nikhileshde.bsky.social.
You can also join the group conversation on Telegram.
See you next week!
