Enough US Senate Democrats are still showing that they are ready to pass a cryptocurrency market structure bill and that the effort has traction, they said in a meeting with several cryptocurrency CEOs on Wednesday that focused on the way forward for cryptocurrency regulation in the US.
Digital asset business leaders had two meetings scheduled for the same day, the first to discuss next steps with Democrats, whose votes will be needed to lift any bill that passes the Senate’s 60-vote threshold. The second meeting is with those lawmakers’ Republican counterparts, who have been pushing a bill that is their response to the House Digital Asset Market Clarity Act.
“It is clear that there is a sufficient level of Democratic support,” Chainlink CEO and co-founder Sergey Nazarov said in a statement to CoinDesk between the meetings. He said more than 10 legislators attended, “all very committed to investing their time and effort to make the bill a success.”
Tension has been rising across party lines and within crypto circles as the chances of the Senate having bandwidth shrink by 2025. When some Democratic legislative proposals on decentralized finance (DeFi) were recently leaked, many in the industry viewed the ideas as a fatal blow to negotiations over market structure. Some of them made those opinions public.
“I think the frictions are temporary and will be resolved soon,” Nazarov said.
The meeting between industry leaders and Democratic lawmakers was said to be led by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, the New York Democrat who has been advocating for tailored crypto regulations for years. Democrats showed great interest in addressing concerns about illicit finance in the legislation, Nazarov said.
With both sides and the industry back at the table this week, crypto leaders are hoping to get the process underway. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who was attending both meetings, had said in a post on social media site
After the first meeting, he reposted that the industry is “keeping up the pressure on DC” to pass a bill, and also noted an effort by Stand With Crypto to drum up support for it.
However, several obstacles remain in this process. The Senate Banking and Agriculture committees need to present the text to the broader Senate, and the former is the only one that has so far produced a draft. And if the Senate passes an eventual bill, it must return to the House for a vote there before it can go to Trump for his signature.
Crypto votes in Congress have been a bright spot in US political work, with huge bipartisan results for the recent bill to regulate stablecoin issuers and the House Clarity Act. But the legislation has to be finished before it can win a vote.
Kristin Smith, president of the Solana Policy Institute, described Wednesday’s meetings as a meeting of lawmakers “committed to getting market structure legislation right.”
And Sen. Cynthia Lummis, a Wyoming Republican who heads the cryptocurrency subcommittee within the Senate Banking Committee, called it a “big day in Washington for the structure of the digital asset market.”
“It is really a win-win for the bill to be passed, for the US government to embrace the digital asset community,” Nazarov said.
