A White House meeting aimed at thawing the crypto market structure bill broke into the controversial topic of stablecoin dividends, although participants representing US banking interests offered no new compromises, according to people familiar with the talks.
As the legislation still struggles to make progress in the U.S. Senate, the White House is calling for practical compromises by the end of this month, the people said.
Monday’s gathering — led by President Donald Trump’s crypto adviser Patrick Witt — targeted some of the issues surrounding the effort, particularly whether stablecoins should be linked to dividends and rewards. Policy experts from the crypto industry and Wall Street banks gathered in the White House diplomatic reception room for more than two hours to discuss how to revise the bill’s stickiest provisions, the people said.
The audience was weighted more toward crypto representatives, and the group is under direction from the White House to find common ground this month, one of the people said. Talks will continue with a narrower group, and the White House has asked them to come to the table ready to agree on actual changes to the bill’s language.
Cody Carbone, who heads the Digital Chamber, which lobbies for crypto policy in Washington, called the meeting “exactly the kind of progress needed to find a solution to one of the biggest issues blocking the next step in regulatory progress for market structure.”
“Inaction is not an option, and we are committed to rolling up our sleeves and doing the hard work to ensure that regulatory progress does not penalize innovators or consumers who see digital assets as a foundation for their economic future,” Carbone said in a statement just after the meeting.
And another of the negotiators, Blockchain Association executive director Summer Mersinger, said Monday’s event was “an important step forward in finding solutions to deliver bipartite legislation on digital asset market structure, and we welcome [crypto adviser] Patrick Witt and the administration’s leadership in bringing stakeholders together to work through one of the remaining key issues: stablecoin rewards.”
From the crypto side, the meeting also included representatives from Coinbase, Circle, Ripple and Crypto.com.
Legislation to govern the US crypto markets has moved through the congressional process, having passed the House of Representatives last year and cleared one of two required Senate committees last week. A complicated slate of legislative steps remains, including progress through the Senate Banking Committee. It is the work of this committee that first highlighted several points of separation in the multiparty negotiations involving Republican and Democratic lawmakers, the crypto industry, bankers and the White House.
The stablecoin dividend debate is at odds between the digital asset space and traditional bankers, who argue that such a dividend could disastrously compete with the deposit business at the core of American banking and credit. But Democrats are also pushing other demands, including anti-corruption provisions targeting Trump’s crypto companies, a requirement that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission be fully staffed by commissioners from both parties, and stricter protections against illicit financing to prevent the sector from aiding crime.
Democrats’ push for an ethics provision to block senior officials from making money from crypto could be further complicated by a Wall Street Journal report that an intelligence chief in the United Arab Emirates secretly bought nearly half of Trump-linked World Liberty Financial Inc.
As the White House hosted Monday’s meeting, the federal government had once again slipped into a partial shutdown due to Congress’s inability to pass a funding plan. That raises questions about how much work the White House and congressional staff can do on these points while the government’s doors are supposed to be closed. A currently negotiated plan is reportedly coming to a head on Tuesday that could reopen the government while leaving an opening to discuss Department of Homeland Security spending separately.
Trump urged House lawmakers to sign off on reopening the government without further changes to the bill that would do so.
“We need to keep the government open and I hope all Republicans and Democrats will join me in supporting this bill and sending it to my desk WITHOUT DELAY,” the president said in a social media post. “There can be NO CHANGES at this time.”
Read more: Crypto bill clears US Senate milestone despite opposition from Democrats
UPDATE (February 2, 2025, 21:22 UTC): Adds details from the meeting and commentary from the Blockchain Association.
