U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis, a lawmaker at the center of talks over the cryptocurrency industry’s main policy goal: passing a market structure bill, said the talks have likely reached the compromises needed to move the legislation forward.
“We think we have it,” Lummis, chairwoman of the Senate Banking Committee’s digital assets subcommittee, said at the House Digital’s DC Blockchain Summit on Wednesday. “We’re really going to get it out of the banking committee in April.”
Lummis has been deeply involved in months of conversations over the language of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. After the process was derailed by banking lobbyists who had argued that stablecoin performance would threaten their industry’s deposit accounts, much of the debate focused on stablecoin bounty programs that the crypto industry believed were still permitted under last year’s National Innovation Guidance and Establishment for US Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act.
The Wyoming Republican said she believes the final compromise will not allow crypto platforms to offer rewards that use any language that equates them with deposit returns or ties rewards to the amount of assets a user owns.
“Anything that sounds like banking product terminology will not appear,” he said. He added that he hasn’t seen the latest language, but said Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has been “really pretty good about being willing to compromise on this issue.”
Armstrong and his US exchange, which has relied heavily on stablecoin rewards programs, had opposed a previous compromise effort, which had initially helped derail the legislative process on this bill.
Sen. Bernie Moreno, another Republican on the committee, said in a video statement at the same event that two of his colleagues on the panel, Democrat Angela Alsobrooks and Republican Thom Tillis, are in the final stages of stablecoin talks, which also involve the White House. Once everyone signs, it’s “time to exit” the bill.
Lummis said previous disagreements over the language governing the security of decentralized finance (DeFi) have also been resolved.
But at the same event, Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a frequent Lummis partner on crypto issues, said another issue that needs to be resolved is Democrats’ request that the bill prohibit top government officials from personally benefiting from the crypto industry, a concept that particularly targets President Donald Trump.
“It’s very important that we include this,” he said Wednesday. No government official in Congress or the White House should be “enriched by their position and knowledge base,” he said, and including such restrictions will “unlock many more votes” from Democrats on the bill.
Lummis suggested the legislation will have a hearing after the Senate’s Easter break, targeting late April. If approved, such a hearing, known as markup, will mark the second necessary committee approval (after the Senate Agriculture Committee had already approved a version earlier this year). It is then reworked into a combined version that could eventually face a vote in the Senate at large.
The Senate calendar, however, changes a lot. Both parties threaten unrelated legislative disputes over other legislation and the war in Iran, which could take up valuable time in the coming weeks. And the 2026 Senate session will also be shortened by midterm congressional elections later this year.
“We’re going to have this done, come hell or high water, before the end of the year,” Lummis said.
UPDATE (March 18, 2026, 15:18 UTC): Adds comments from Senator Bernie Moreno.
UPDATE (March 18, 2026, 16:28 UTC): Adds comments from Senator Kirsten Gillibrand on the bill’s ethics provision.
