Key senators critical to advancing crypto market structure legislation may soon be willing to move forward on the bill, people familiar with it told CoinDesk.
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Crypto dealmakers’ hopes are bubbling around the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, the Senate legislation that represents the industry’s top policy hope. Top senators — those who have dragged their feet on stable coin yields — are considering what appears to be bankers’ final view on what their industry would consider acceptable, according to people familiar with the negotiations.
After weeks of increasingly tense relations between crypto insiders and bank representatives tasked with finding a compromise, this week saw the situation come to a head with new legislative language circulating from bankers over the stablecoin rewards debate. President Donald Trump made an aggressive argument on his Truth Social site that banks were trying to use the Clarity Act to undermine the already-passed stablecoin law, the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for American Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act.
“The Genius Act was America’s first big step in making the United States the crypto capital of the world, and implementing the Clarity Act is the next step to finish the job and, more importantly, keep this great and powerful industry in our country,” Trump argued after meeting with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. “Banks should not try to undermine the Genius Act or hijack the Clarity Act. »
Summer Mersinger, CEO of the Blockchain Association, said the White House “by taking part in the negotiations and encouraging banks to negotiate in good faith, adds important momentum to continued talks.”
For their part, banks have argued that the foundation of banking and lending in the United States depends on customer deposits, and they say an alternative to these accounts in the crypto sector could derail banks. That argument has hit hard on Senators Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, and Angela Alsobrooks, Democrat of Maryland, and the rest of the Senate Banking Committee is waiting to see if they are willing to move forward with a revision of the bill. At this point, an emerging compromise that could allow for a narrow range of stable rewards appears to be similar to positions previously favored by participants.
In an interview with CNBC, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., seemed to signal, in the face of his industry’s openness to compromise, that it is possible to reward stablecoin activities and transactions as long as the stablecoins held in the same place should not be rewarded with a return that resembles the interest on a savings account. He also said crypto companies that operate as depository institutions should be subject to the same strict regulators as banks.
President Trump’s son, Eric, added his views on the social network. Eric Trump called bankers “anti-consumer and downright un-American.”
“Let me be very clear: Big banks (think JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, etc.) are putting additional pressure to prevent Americans from earning higher returns on their savings – while also trying to prevent rewards or perks from being given to customers,” he wrote.
While all these comments are pouring out, crypto representatives are quietly hoping that the Clarity Act will go into effect next week.
“Senator Tillis has been very receptive to our discussions about stablecoin performance,” Digital Chamber CEO Cody Carbone said in a statement to CoinDesk. “I am optimistic that we will find a way to get a ‘yes’ vote on the bill, and we appreciate his work in trying to move the rules of the road forward on market structure.”
If the Senate Banking Committee succeeds in advancing the bill through a markup hearing, the text will be incorporated into a previous version that was already passed by the Senate Agriculture Committee on a party-line vote. The combined version, however, would need significant support from Democrats if it had any chance of getting a vote in the full Senate.
The process remains challenged by the passage of time in the Senate, where speaking time is limited, and where the mid-term elections to Congress will be dispersed starting this summer. The Senate schedule likely leaves only a few more months of wiggle room before the door begins to close on a 2026 Clarity Act.
THURSDAY
- 2:00 p.m. UTC (10:00 a.m. ET) The Securities and Exchange Commission’s Investor Advisory Committee will hold a meeting where it will discuss, among other topics, a recommendation on how the regulator should handle tokenized equity securities.
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