The White House’s top crypto adviser, Patrick Witt, said work is still underway to nail down the compromise he believes will move the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act forward in the US Senate, although he said several other items are also being worked out behind the scenes.
In an interview on CoinDesk TV on Monday, the executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors on Digital Assets suggested on Monday that the common ground that key senators from both parties said they had secured on the stablecoin dividend appears to be intact. “We are hopeful that the compromise that has been reached will be sustainable and will last,” Witt said. “Fixing that was a must-have before we could get into the other outstanding issues,” which he said he is now targeting, although some of the issues have already been resolved.
Aside from the issue of returns on stablecoins, which bankers had successfully convinced some in the Senate that their deposit base could be at risk, the Clarity Act had a number of other potential problems. Among these have been the illegal financial protections in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space and a request by Democrats that high-ranking officials (most pointedly, President Donald Trump) be barred from profiting from the crypto sector.
While Witt would not identify the issues that have been settled in the ongoing talks, he said the talks were “making significant progress in the background” while the dividend argument between banks and crypto firms got most of the attention.
“We are very close to shutting them out,” he said. “All of these issues felt intractable and intractable at one point. So the fact that we’ve been able to close a lot of them gives me confidence that we can close out these others as well.”
The Clarity Act would need a markup hearing in the Senate Banking Committee before it can be advanced to a final Senate vote. It had been close to such a hearing at the beginning of the year, but bank lobbyists raised objections to the stablecoin dividend that delayed the process.
Last week, White House economists issued a report that downplayed the threats the banking sector claimed posed by giving stablecoin holders a return similar to interest from a bank account. On Monday, the American Bankers Association hit back, saying the White House’s argument was flawed. Witt said the view of bankers varies depending on how close they are to technology.
“They struggle with it,” he said. “These are all important issues for their members.
And you know, some of them will look more favorably on stablecoins. Some will be a bit more threatened by them.”
Read more: Trump’s crypto adviser rejects Jamie Dimon on treating yield-bearing stablecoins like banks
