Republican lawmakers still hope for crypto legislation this year

Nathan Howard/Bloomberg

WASHINGTON — Efforts to pass a bill setting up a regulatory structure for cryptocurrency in the United States are still alive, with some key Republican lawmakers maintaining hope to pass a comprehensive bill before the end of the year. 

Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., a member of the Senate Banking Committee who's authored her own legislation on crypto regulation in the past, both signaled optimism that crypto proposals could get attached to a must-pass piece of legislation. 

McHenry pointed to an end-of-year spending package or the National Defense Authorization Act as possible vehicles for a crypto bill. 

"But if it doesn't happen this Congress, it will happen," he said. "It will happen because there is momentum in both parties for clear rules of the road and keeping pace with what Europe is doing, what Japan is doing, what Singapore is doing, and other regulators around the world."

McHenry is set to retire after this session and after successfully shepherding a significant digital assets bill through the House of Representatives earlier this year. That bill garnered an unexpected level of bipartisan support, with 71 House Democrats joining Republicans in passing the measure. 

The bill stalled in the Senate, where it faces opposition from notable crypto skeptics, such as Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. 

"There are seeds that you plant that may not grow in your timeframe," McHenry said. "The policy footprints that I've left in the sand, maybe somebody else's name may be on it when it gets signed into law, but I think we have a nice framework." 

Lummis, meanwhile, is pushing for the Senate Agriculture Committee to take up the issue across the finish line in the coming months. 

"I do think we're going to get something done during the lame duck," she said. "I'm an optimist." 

She pointed to a bill in the Senate Agriculture Committee, worked on by the panel's chair Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., that defines much of the jurisdiction of digital assets within the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as a commodity, rather than a security, which would be regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

"If that bill comes out of the Senate Ag Committee during the lame duck, then it will get what we call Christmas trees with other additional amendments added onto it to create a bigger financial services bill." 

Some of the measures that could be added on to such an effort might include the SAFER Banking Act, which would clarify that banks can provide services to legal marijuana businesses, she said. 

"I think there are minor tweaks that can be made to the Senate Ag Committee bill that could mean that it gets out of committee this year," she said. "So I don't really want to wait, because there's going to be so much to do early on in 2025 that I worry that we'll not get to it again until late in 2025 and we just can't wait anymore."