Though the U.S. government remains shut down, the Senate is a hive of crypto activity this week, with Republican lawmakers now matching a planned Democrat meeting with industry leaders set for Wednesday.
After CEOs such as Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong and Chainlink’s Sergey Nazarov meet with as many as 10 Democratic senators, according to people familiar with the plans, they’ll jump to a similar meeting with those lawmakers’ Republican counterparts. The chief topic of conversation is the crypto industry’s top policy priority: the legislation that would establish U.S. regulation for the broader crypto sector.
The bill — known in the already-approved House of Representatives version as the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act — had been advancing through the usual process in the Senate, where legislative efforts generally have to lean into bipartisanship to clear the 60-vote threshold. Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee produced a working draft, but Congress then got mired in a budget dispute that shut down the government.
And possibly more importantly, a document showing suggested Democrat language on decentralized finance leaked, causing an uproar from industry insiders who cast it as a potential deal-breaker in the negotiations.
So, the Senate Democrats and leaders from the industry set up a Wednesday meeting to hash things out. And now, Republicans will hear from them, too. In that second meeting, the industry’s GOP allies will likely get an indication of which points the CEOs were told by Democrats that they’re encouraging movement on.
Industry leaders involved in these meetings are said to include the heads of Kraken, Uniswap, Galaxy Digital, Solana Policy Institute and senior executives from Circle, a16z Crypto and Jito.
A prevailing sentiment from many crypto lobbyists is that it would be difficult to get the market structure bill back on track this year, and next year’s midterm elections could make any serious policy efforts difficult. Without this legislation becoming law, the sector is left only halfway to enacting its policy aims in the U.S., having celebrated a first major success with a new law to regulate stablecoin issuers.
And until Congress can get the government’s doors open again, lawmakers’ chief focus remains on the budget dispute.
When they return to their crypto work, the Republican allies of crypto do have a significant number of like-minded Democrats across the aisle who are ready to approve major crypto legislation. But the Democrats had raised a number of issues to work on, including consumer protection, illicit-finance concerns and the conflicts of interest presented by top government officials engaging in the industry — most notably, President Donald Trump.
Both the Senate Banking Committee and Senate Agriculture Committee must produce and approve of the legislation before it can get a floor vote in the overall Senate. The Agriculture Committee has yet to publish any draft legislation.
“Any durable policy must be bipartisan,” said Blockchain Association CEO Summer Mersinger, in a statement sent to CoinDesk on Monday, underlining that both parties need to be on board.
An approval in the Senate would send it over to the House for a similar vote. That chamber had already approved the Clarity Act with an overwhelming majority, and some senior members of the House have argued that the Senate could skip a lot of headaches by just voting on the House’s Clarity Act and sending it directly to Trump.
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