White House, lawmakers target September to move sweeping crypto legislation

Lawmakers and the White House are pushing to pass comprehensive legislation to regulate the cryptocurrency industry by the end of September.

That timeline was revealed during a fireside chat on Thursday with Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott, R-S.C., Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., and Executive Director of the President’s Council of Advisers on Digital Assets Bo Hines.

Earlier this week, Lummis, Scott, and other senators released principles that will “guide discussion and negotiations” for such a bill. Those principles include a Securities and Exchange Commission exemption for “certain digital asset fundraising” and requirements that customers’ funds are protected during bankruptcy proceedings.

“We will have a bill draft that we can hopefully put out before the August recess, then mark it up in September,” Lummis said.

Lawmakers in Washington have been working to pass a crypto market structure bill as well as another to create a federal regulatory framework for stablecoins. There have been rumblings that both bills would be combined, but Hines indicated those would be moved separately.

“We look forward to the House taking this [stablecoin bill] up and sending it over to the President’s desk and then we look forward to moving on to market structure and giving the industry the clarity they need to build and innovate here in the United States,” Hines said on Thursday.

State of play

The full Senate passed its version of a stablecoin bill last week called the GENIUS Act. The bill requires stablecoins to be fully backed by U.S. dollars or similarly liquid assets, mandates annual audits for issuers with a market capitalization of more than $50 billion, and establishes guidelines for foreign issuance. The bill also blocks non-financial publicly traded firms, such as Meta and Amazon, from issuing stablecoins unless they meet certain criteria involving financial risk and privacy for consumer data.

The House has its own version of a stablecoin bill that has some differences compared to GENIUS, such as state pathways and treatment of foreign issuers. The House Financial Services Committee advanced the bill out of its committee in May, but has not yet gone to a full House vote. So far, it seems likely that the House will take on GENIUS, given that the Senate version has needed bipartisan support.

Notably, President Donald Trump has said he wants a stablecoin bill on his desk by August.

Meanwhile, the House has forged ahead with its version of a market structure bill through the Clarity Act. The bill looks to create a clear regulatory framework for crypto in part through designating how the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will regulate. The bill also requires digital asset firms to provide disclosures to customers and segregate customer funds from their own. Two pivotal committees passed the bill on earlier this month, teeing it up for the full House for a vote.

Scott said he has had “constant communication” with his colleagues in the House.

“We are one team, frankly, that’s the good news,” Scott said. “That does not mean that we see everything exactly the same, but we resolve issues and we move forward.”

“I’ve been very clear that I think the President’s mandate of moving the GENIUS Act immediately to his desk is in the best interest of the American people and making sure that there is a timeline for market structure to be completed by September 30,” Scott said, adding that he believed both can be done “in a very time sensitive manner.”

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