WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. House of Representatives should have the actual text to debate on Wednesday of a bill that would regulate stablecoins, according to a key lawmaker pushing that legislation, which should get the House ready to potentially catch up with a parallel Senate effort.
Rep. Bryan Steil, the Republican who leads the crypto subcommittee within the House Financial Services Committee, said at a Wednesday event in Washington that the bill would be unveiled before the day is out. The Senate has already recently advanced its own version of the U.S. stablecoin oversight legislation through the Senate Banking Committee.
Both bills would set up guardrails for the issuance of digital tokens that are based on the value of steady assets — almost always the U.S. dollar — and the major historical sticking point was over how the issuer would be regulated by states and federal agencies.
A House stablecoin markup — a session in which a relevant committee debates amendments and decides whether to move a bill to the overall House floor — should happen “in the very near future,” Steil said. House lawmakers, including Rep. French Hill, the chairman of the full committee, are working to “close the gap” with the Senate, Steil said.
The stablecoin effort in Congress, which cleared the House during the last session but was stymied in the Senate, is the narrower and potentially easier of the two major crypto bills the industry hopes become law this year. The other is legislation that would regulate how the digital assets markets function in the U.S., and how the assets and transactions would be governed. That one is significantly more complicated, but Steil outlined how this Congress is in better shape to get it done.
“We now have a very different political landscape,” he said. “We maintain a very pro-crypto House of Representatives,” he added, with “really good working relationships with a number of Democrats,” and a similar situation in the Senate.
He said the market-structure bill should get a House hearing in early April.
The speaker list at the Washington event, hosted by the Digital Chamber, reveals how much more connected to Congress the industry is this year. More than a half dozen U.S. senators were set to appear, and almost a dozen members of the House, including multiple Democrats.
The crypto sector has already seen momentum on Capitol Hill in the early days of the congressional session, with big bipartisan support in an effort in both the House and Senate seeking to erase an Internal Revenue Service rule targeting decentralized finance (DeFi). The Senate Banking Committee also easily advanced a stablecoin bill with supporters from both parties.