White House top crypto advisor Patrick Witt said work is still being done to secure the compromise that he believes will advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act in the US Senate, although he said several other points are also being worked on behind the scenes.
In an interview on CoinDesk TV on Monday, the executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets suggested Monday that the common ground that key senators from both parties said they had secured on the stablecoin’s performance appears to be intact. “We are hopeful that the compromise reached will last and be maintained,” Witt said. “Resolving that was imperative before we could address the other outstanding issues,” which he said have now turned a corner, although some of the issues have already been resolved.
Aside from the issue of stablecoin performance, on which bankers had successfully convinced some in the Senate that their deposit base could be at risk, the Clarity Act had other potential obstacles. These include illicit financial protections in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space and a request from Democrats that top government officials (more specifically, President Donald Trump) be prohibited from profiting from the crypto sector.
Although Witt did not identify the issues that have been resolved in the ongoing talks, he said the negotiations “made considerable progress on the bottom line,” while the argument over performance between banks and cryptocurrency companies received the most attention.
“We are very close to closing them,” he said. “All of these problems seemed intractable and unsolvable at one point. So the fact that we were able to solve many of them gives me confidence that we will be able to solve the others as well.”
The Clarity Act would need a review hearing in the Senate Banking Committee before it can advance to a final vote in the Senate. It had been close to such a hearing earlier in the year, but banking lobbyists raised objections to the stablecoin’s performance that delayed the process.
Last week, White House economists issued a report that downplayed the threats the banking industry says posed by giving stablecoin holders a return similar to the interest on a bank account. On Monday, the American Bankers Association responded by saying the White House argument was flawed. Witt said bankers’ vision is very broad, depending on how close they are to the technology.
“They’re dealing with it,” he said. “These are all important issues for its members.
And, you know, some of them will view stablecoins more positively. “Some will feel a little more threatened by them.”
Read more: Trump’s crypto advisor rebuffs Jamie Dimon for treating yield-generating stablecoins like banks
