The US House Financial Services Committee checked the next box to move towards what representative Bryan Steel referred to as “the second half” of President Donald Trump’s crypto agenda: a bill to tune us crypto market rules for a fully regulated domestic industry.
Steel, Republican President of the Panel’s Crypto Under Committee, said the first half of Trump’s goal is well underway the stablecoin legislation of the Congress, already obtained through committees in both parliament and the Senate-so on Wednesday hearing the second long awaited digital assets to establish the structure of Krypto’s markets. Such hearings represent a ring on the increase of such an effort through the congress.
Representative French Hill, the Arkansas Republican, who operates the overall committee, indicated that those working on the bill are closer to releasing a successor to the financial innovation and technology of the 21st century law (Fit21), the domestic law that passed last year but failed to pass through the Senate.
“The committee has been engaged to a large number of stakeholders, from government agencies to executives in the ecosystem to identify ways in which market structure legislation can be further improved and strengthened,” he said during the consultation. “We are actively working to release a legislative draft of discussion that reflects this feedback from members and market participants.”
Democrats in the committee repeatedly returned to the crypto business activity of Trump and his family and asked Industry’s lawyers whether it represents a conflict of interest. Representative Maxine Waters, the committee’s ranking Democrat, accused the panel of trying to make Trump “the King of Crypto by adopting legislation that lets him corner the market on stableecoins, kicking George Washington out of the dollar and making his own stableecoin.”
The witnesses mostly declined to engage in Trump, although a consumer lawyer who testifies on Wednesday, Alexandra Thornton, a senior director at the Center for American Progress, noted “There have been a number of things that the Trump administration has done that have favored crypto, and they include many who you mentioned but also let go of too many hand -enforcement persons who dropped many cases against Crypto. ”
The legislators also drilled down on the right roles for Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission in future crypto supervision, and how Congress should define, what regulatory buckets to deal with the various digital assets. In recent years, SEC’s interpretation of how to use securities legislation left to identify which crypto -tokens are securities, industry in legal confusion and mirror in enforcement visions despite some early guides from the Agency on how to negotiate legal standards.
“Market participants have still found it challenging to apply,” said Tiffany Smith, who works with Crypto clients at the law firm Wilmerhale. She added that the definitions become even more complicated when the majority of crypto transactions occur in secondary markets, such as on crypto exchanges. “Regulatory clarity is necessary,” she said.
Later on Wednesday, the Under Committee’s counterpart in the House Agriculture Committee had a related consultation aimed at promoting a market structure bill. This committee oversees CFTC, which is likely to have a leading role in police of US crypto transactions.
Read more: US House StableCOin Bill is ready to become public, says legislator on top of the Crypto Panel
Update (9 April 2025, 18:17 UTC): Adds information about related home hearing in the AG Committee.
