The White House meeting aimed at melting the ice on the cryptocurrency market structure bill addressed the controversial issue of stablecoin performance, with participants saying they had made progress in the negotiation as the legislation is still struggling to advance in the US Senate.
Monday’s meeting, led by President Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency czar David Sacks, targeted some of the sticking points over the legislation, including whether stablecoins should be associated with performance and rewards. Policy experts from the cryptocurrency industry and Wall Street banks met in the White House Diplomatic Reception Room for more than two hours to discuss how to revise the bill’s most complicated provisions, according to people familiar with the conversations.
Talks will continue, the people said, so the difficult negotiation has not driven participants from the table.
Cody Carbone, who heads the Digital Chamber that lobbies for crypto policy in Washington, called the meeting “exactly the kind of progress needed to find a resolution to one of the biggest issues blocking next steps in market structure legislative progress.”
“Inaction is not an option, and we are committed to rolling up our sleeves and working hard to ensure that legislative progress does not punish innovators or consumers who see digital assets as the foundation of their financial future,” Carbone said in a statement just after the meeting.
Legislation to govern US crypto markets has been moving through the congressional process, having passed the House of Representatives last year and cleared one of two necessary Senate committees last week. What remains remains a complicated set of legislative measures, including progress through the Senate Banking Committee. It is the work of that committee that first highlighted the various points of separation in the multiparty negotiation involving Republican and Democratic lawmakers, the cryptocurrency industry, bankers and the White House.
The debate over the yield of stablecoins is contested between the digital asset space and traditional bankers, who argue that such yield could catastrophically compete with the deposit business at the center of American banking and credit. But Democrats also put forward other demands, including anti-corruption provisions targeting Trump’s crypto firms, a requirement that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission have commissioners from both parties, and stronger protections against illicit finance to prevent the sector from contributing to criminality.
Democrats’ push for an ethical provision to prevent top government officials from profiting from cryptocurrencies may be further complicated by a Wall Street Journal report that a United Arab Emirates intelligence chief secretly bought nearly half of Trump-linked World Liberty Financial Inc.
As the White House hosted Monday’s meeting, the federal government had fallen back into a partial shutdown due to Congress’ inability to get a funding plan passed. This raises questions about how much work the White House and congressional staff can do on these points while the government’s doors are supposed to be closed. A currently negotiated plan that could reopen the government and leave an opportunity to separately debate Department of Homeland Security spending is reportedly coming to a head on Tuesday.
Trump urged House lawmakers to approve reopening the government without making any further changes to the bill that would do so.
“We need to open the Government and I hope all Republicans and Democrats will join me in supporting this bill and send it to my desk WITHOUT DELAY,” the president said in a social media post. “There can be NO CHANGES at this time.”
Read more: Cryptocurrency bill passes milestone in US Senate despite Democratic opposition
