The White House is targeting July 4 for Congress to pass the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, Patrick Witt, executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors on Digital Assets, told CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference on Wednesday.
“We’re aiming for the 4th of July. I think it would be a great birthday present for America celebrating our 250th year,” Witt said. The mechanics, according to Witt, are: Senate Banking Committee markup this month, four work weeks in the Senate in June for floor passage and enough runway for a vote in a U.S. House of Representatives before the Independence Day deadline.
That timeline predates the prediction Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand shared on the same stage earlier in the day, when the New York Democrat predicted Clarity would reach the president’s desk by the first week of August.
“There’s not a lot of slack left in the rope right now,” Witt said. “But it’s an achievable timeline.”
The path to markup opened when Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) released a compromise on the bill’s provisions on stablecoin returns in early May that banned bank deposit-equivalent returns on stablecoins while leaving room for rewards tied to spending. Witt said the White House called in banks and crypto firms to create the language, then handed it to senators, who ran their own process and arrived at a text that both sides found equally unsatisfactory.
“Crypto is unhappy, banks are unhappy, but they’re both about equally unhappy,” Witt said. “And so we know we’ve got the right compromise.” Witt believed that the stablecoin yield issue “is closed.”
The White House is also nearing a deal on the conflict-of-interest provision that has divided Democrats and the administration. Witt said the negotiating position is to accept rules that apply “across the board, from the president all the way down to the brand new intern on Capitol Hill,” but reject anything that singles out a particular office or official. “We will not allow the targeting of anyone’s family, any particular politician,” he said. “I’m optimistic we’ll be able to close it out.”
When talking about what happens if Clarity slips past 2026, Witt said, “If we don’t set the standard, if we don’t write the rules, then we’re going to be a rule follower and we’re going to be following somebody else’s rulebook on this. And God forbid it’s China that ultimately writes those rules.”
America’s leadership in global capital markets, he added, is one of the things that “signature American hegemony.”
Witt also discussed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, the stablecoin issuer law passed last year in which the rulemaking by the Treasury Department, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and other agencies are closing in on a one-year July deadline.
“These are complicated issues. They require following the Administrative Procedure Act and soliciting comments. And we received a flood of comments,” Witt said. The law, he added, exemplifies “the effective limit of regulation: just enough to allow an industry to flourish … but not so much as to overburden an innovation into irrelevance.”
