‘Nothing is holding up this bill,’ says Democratic Sen. Gillibrand as Senate barrels forward to advance major crypto bill

Lawmakers are pushing to advance a sweeping cryptocurrency bill that they hope will ultimately land on President Donald Trump’s desk.

Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. and Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., spoke on Tuesday at the Blockchain Association Policy Summit in Washington, D.C. and unpacked where lawmakers are headed in passing a bill to regulate the crypto industry at large. 

Democrats and Republicans are negotiating constantly, Gillibrand said, adding that lawmakers had their first bipartisan meeting last week that went really well. 

“Nothing is holding up this bill,” Gillibrand said. 

Lawmakers’ push for a broader crypto market-structure bill has dragged on for years, but it gained momentum this summer when the House passed its version in July, called the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, or Clarity for short.

The Senate has since embarked on its journey to pass a somewhat similar bill.

The Senate Banking Committee has a draft that looks to allocate jurisdiction between the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission, as well as create a new term for “ancillary assets” to clarify which cryptocurrencies are not securities. Meanwhile, the Senate Agriculture Committee has drafted legislation it released last month that would give new authority to the CFTC. 

Now, the goal is to share a draft at the end of this week and hold a hearing to amend and vote on the bill next week, Lummis said, who is a member of the Senate Banking Committee. 

Democrats met on Monday night and gave Republican staff their final asks that they are looking to get into the bill, Gillibrand said. 

“We delivered that set of asks to them [Republicans] last night and then Cynthia and I and some others are going to meet today, go through some of them, and I’m just very optimistic that this product is going to be so strong when we are finished because even the House didn’t tackle all the issues that we’re tackling in this draft,” Gillibrand said. One of those areas was how to regulate decentralized finance exchanges, she said. 

A day earlier, Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, had a different take on how crypto legislative talks were going. Moreno told the summit that negotiations had been “decently frustrating” over the past couple of weeks. 

‘Three-dimensional chess’

Negotiations extend to the White House as well, Lummis said.

“While the Democrats and Republicans are negotiating, we’re also working with the industry and the White House,” Lummis said on Tuesday. “So it’s a little bit of three-dimensional chess.”

Trump’s involvement in the crypto industry has been a critical issue for many Democrats. Bloomberg previously estimated over the summer that the sitting president has profited some $620 million from his family’s crypto ventures, including the World Liberty Financial DeFi and stablecoin project, which lists Trump and his three sons as co-founders. Democrats have been pushing for ethics provisions to be included in a bill, such as limiting elected officials and their families from issuing, endorsing and making a profit from digital assets while in office. 

Lummis said she negotiated ethics language with Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego and sent that to the White House. 

 “The White House kicked it back and said, you can do better than this,” Lummis said. “So it was unacceptable to the White House.” 

Lummis said she plans to try again. 

Cody Carbone, CEO of The Digital Chamber, said there is still hope to get a crypto market structure advanced this year and to Trump’s desk by early 2026.

“The door is still open for market structure progress in the waning days of Congress this year,” Carbone told The Block. “We are eagerly watching to see if committee markups are noticed later this week, because that is the progress we need to see to get a market structure bill to the President in early 2026.”

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