Congressmen Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) and Max Miller (R-Ohio) reintroduced their Digital Asset Protection, Accountability, Regulation, Innovation, Taxation and Yields (PARITY) Act late last month, in an effort to update how the US addresses crypto and taxes.
Congress will deal with taxes (in general) in the coming months, and crypto may end up being part of this. It is quite important for anyone in the US who owns crypto at all, as they will have to report their holdings and transactions of digital assets.
The PARITY Act was first released in discussion draft last December and re-released on March 26 for further review.
The most immediately visible change seems to be the section on “de minimis” gains. De minimis exemptions generally allow certain transactions to be exempt from tax reporting. Under such an exemption, people need not report the transaction or worry about the tax burden that might otherwise follow.
The industry has long sought a de minimis exemption for small transactions, which could make it easier for individuals to do things like buy coffee without having to report a capital gain or loss on the crypto used in that transaction. The December 2025 version of the PARITY Act began with a section dealing with de minimis exemptions for payments made via “regulated stablecoins,” noting that the threshold would be $200.
While the section did not appear to extend these exemptions to digital assets like Bitcoin the note went on to say that it pointed to stablecoins specifically because of the GENIUS Act.
The March 2026 version of the text did not explicitly state that there should be a de minimis exemption, but parts appeared to address this concern:
“In the case of any sale of a regulated payment stablecoin, no gain or loss shall be recognized on such sale unless the taxpayer’s basis in such stablecoin is less than 99 percent of the redemption value of such stablecoin,” the bill states. It removed the $200 threshold and created a deemed basis of $1 for exchanges, which is separate from the sale of stablecoin.
The latest draft would also apply wash sale rules to digital asset transactions, which isn’t a particularly controversial position — Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) even included wash sale provisions in her tax bill last year.
This bill would also distinguish between “passive efforts” and activities such as trading.
It is unclear what the next steps for this bill might be; while there is talk of a ballot tax bill and US President Donald Trump unveiled his budget requests for fiscal year 2027, it is far from certain that the ballot bill will happen or that crypto will be a part of it.
Nevertheless, conversations with industry participants in the past few weeks suggest that there will be a strong push to include crypto in any tax legislation that is likely to become law.
Editor’s note: This article was originally posted as part of CoinDesk’s State of Crypto newsletter earlier this month.
