The House Ways and Means Committee distributed seven bills ahead of this week’s hearing on cryptocurrency tax policy, indicating what the industry can expect.
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the narrative
The House Ways and Means Committee is the group of lawmakers charged with writing the laws that govern taxes. While we have already seen bills addressing taxes, it is this committee that will actually do a lot of the work of drafting crypto tax legislation and guiding it through the legislative process.
Why is it important
The fact that the committee is about to discuss a bill at a hearing shows progress on this front, and the provisions will likely eventually become law in the coming years, either as part of a tax-specific legislative package or as part of some other broader bill.
breaking it
Gambling and mining, de minimis and stablecoin transactions are covered in bills distributed Thursday night by the House Ways and Means Committee, among several other topics.
It is unclear how much progress will be made in terms of signing these bills into law in calendar year 2026. The House (and Senate, for that matter) has other priorities that are further along and require session time, as CoinDesk has covered before. Still, the existence of the bills and a hearing are important steps.
Alison Mangiero, head of industry affairs and US policy at the Crypto Council for Innovation, an industry trade group, said in a statement that the group of bills was an “important first step.”
“The Ways and Means Committee’s decision to release seven bills and follow up with a full committee legislative hearing on June 9 is important only for procedural reasons,” he said. “This format, in which members work through specific legislation with expert witnesses before any margin, is one that the Committee has not used in years. That type of deliberate and structured engagement represents the Committee’s unique approach to this important work.”
Mangiero called the bills the third leg of the metaphorical three-legged stool of cryptocurrency legislation, with the other legs including the GENIUS Act focused on stablecoins and the Clarity Act focused on market structure (the latter of which, as we all know, is still elbow-deep in the legislative process).
“Several provisions in this package reflect priorities we have long advanced: sensible tax treatment for GENIUS-compliant stablecoins that allows them to function as the payment instruments they are; a de minimis exception for routine network transaction fees, a relief we have long advocated for and which we believe should be expanded further as the process continues; parity provisions that extend securities lending, market value, and charitable deduction treatment to digital assets broadly. traded; and clear rules for the taxation of mining and reward betting,” he said.
In semi-related news, the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s Investor Advisory Committee also met late last month to discuss, among other issues, whether stablecoins qualify to be treated as cash equivalents.
The committee believes there needs to be a “high threshold” to establish something as cash equivalent, according to a meeting summary shared with CoinDesk. Committee members did not reach a consensus on what type of information would be useful to investors.
Potential information disclosed includes how reserves are structured, the type of stablecoin, who the issuer is, where funds are held, disaggregated information on cash equivalents and currency risk, and even whether the information disclosed was provisional.
The committee will meet again in November.
Tuesday
- 18:00 UTC (2:00 pm ET): The House Ways and Means Committee will hold a hearing to discuss crypto tax policy.
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