U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis, a lawmaker at the center of negotiations to pass the cryptocurrency industry’s top policy goal of a market structure bill, said talks may have reached the necessary compromises to move the legislation forward.
“We think we’ve done that,” Lummis, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee’s digital assets subcommittee, said Wednesday at the Chamber of Digital Commerce’s DC Blockchain Summit. “We’re really going to get it out of the banking committee in April.”
Lummis was deeply involved in months of negotiations over the language of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. Much of the debate, amid bank lobbyists arguing that stablecoin earnings threaten their industry’s deposit accounts, has focused on stablecoin reward programs, which the cryptocurrency industry contends are still allowed under last year’s Stablecoin Guidance and Establishing National Innovation in the United States (GENIUS) Act.
The Wyoming Republican said she believes a final compromise would ban crypto platforms from offering rewards using any language that equates them to deposit yields or ties rewards to the amount of assets a user holds.
“Anything that sounds like banking product jargon won’t come up,” she said. She added that she had not seen the latest language, but said Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong was “very willing to compromise on this issue.”
Armstrong and his U.S. exchange, which relies heavily on stablecoin reward programs, opposed an early compromise effort that initially derailed the bill’s legislative process.
She said previous language differences regarding the security of decentralized finance (DeFi) have also been resolved.
Loomis said the bill would receive a hearing after the Senate’s Easter break, pointing to the end of April. If it does pass such a hearing, known as a markup, it would mark the second necessary approval by the committee (after a version already passed by the Senate Agriculture Committee earlier this year). It was then redesigned into a consolidated version that could ultimately face a vote by the full Senate.
However, the Senate schedule is highly variable. Both sides have threatened to engage in unrelated legislative fights over other legislation and the Iran war, which could take up precious floor time in the coming weeks. The Senate’s 2026 session will also be shortened due to the congressional midterm elections later this year.
“One way or another, we’re going to get this done by the end of the year,” Loomis said.