The White House is aiming for Congress to pass the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act on July 4, Patrick Witt, executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets, said at CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference on Wednesday.
“We’re aiming for the Fourth of July. I think it would be a tremendous birthday gift to America, celebrating our 250th anniversary,” Witt said. The mechanisms, according to Witt, are: Senate Banking Committee markup this month, four weeks of Senate work in June for floor approval, and enough margin for a U.S. House vote before the Independence Day deadline.
That timeline is ahead of the prediction Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand shared on the same stage earlier that day, when the New York Democrat predicted Clarity would arrive on the president’s desk in the first week of August.
“There’s not much slack left in the rope right now,” Witt said. “But it is an achievable schedule.”
The path to the margin opened when Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Senator Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) released a compromise on the bill’s provisions on stablecoin yield in early May, prohibiting yield equivalent to bank deposits on stablecoins and leaving room for rewards tied to spending. Witt said the White House convened banks and cryptocurrency companies to craft the language, then gave it to senators, who conducted their own process and came up with text that both sides found equally unsatisfactory.
“Cryptocurrencies are unhappy, banks are unhappy, but both are equally unhappy,” Witt said. “And then we know we got the right commitment.” Witt considered that the issue of stablecoin performance “is closed.”
The White House is also moving closer to a deal on the conflict of interest provision that has divided Democrats and the administration. Witt said the negotiating position is to accept rules that apply “across the board, from the president to the new intern on Capitol Hill,” but reject anything that singles out a particular position or official. “We are not going to allow anyone’s family to be attacked, no politician in particular,” he said. “I’m optimistic we’ll be able to close that.”
Speaking about what happens if Clarity moves past 2026, Witt said: “If we’re not setting the standard, if we’re not writing the rules, then we’re going to follow the rules and we’re going to follow someone else’s rule book on this. And God forbid it’s China that ultimately writes those rules.”
American leadership in global capital markets, he added, is one of the things that “guarantee American hegemony.”
Witt also discussed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, the stablecoin issuance law passed last year, where regulation by the Treasury Department, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and other agencies is approaching a one-year deadline in July.
“These are complicated issues. They require following the Administrative Procedures Act and soliciting comments. And we received a flood of comments,” Witt said. The law, he added, exemplifies “the efficient frontier of regulation: enough to allow an industry to flourish… but not so much that it overloads an innovation until it becomes irrelevant.”
