Leading Crypto Senator Sees End of Year as U.S. Legislation Target

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In the wake of the U.S. Senate passing its first major crypto bill, one of the industry chief proponents there, Senator Cynthia Lummis, said the final step toward U.S. regulations for the crypto sector may take several more months to complete, potentially skipping past the August deadline set by President Donald Trump.

The Senate's recent approval of stablecoin legislation is just one of many steps that potentially remain in turning two related efforts — also including the push toward new rules to govern U.S. digital asset markets — into U.S. law.

When asked for a realistic timeline on this year's crypto efforts, Lummis told a Bitcoin Policy Institute audience in Washington, "I think before the end of this calendar year" for finishing all of the related legislation. The Wyoming Republican said she'd be "extremely disappointed" if that wasn't the case.

"We're in a good place," she said at the Wednesday event. But the chairwoman of the Senate Banking Committee's digital assets subcommittee also led a hearing on Tuesday to make a first foray into discussion of market structure legislation in that chamber, acknowledging it won't be easy. She hinted at the delicacy of the bipartisan wave that helped drive 18 Democratic votes (for 68 total) on the stablecoin bill last week, which she equated to "a tooth-pulling exercise."

At her Tuesday hearing, a shortage of Democrats showed up to question witnesses, and she made some remarks at the end revealing her awareness the parties are approaching the effort differently.

"I don't want to come up with a piece of legislation that the other side of the aisle feels they haven't had adequate input in, and so that is going to require maybe me to go out of my way to pursue additional discussions directly with the other side of the aisle," she said, questioning how the pursuit of crypto legislation became divisive. "It was very bipartisan then and now it seems not to be, and I don't understand what's changed, at least with regard to this topic."

Some Democratic lawmakers have demanded that Congress needs to insist in these bills that senior government officials, including the president, not be allowed to directly engage in crypto businesses. While Republican lawmakers have generally shied away from openly discussing the criticism that Trump's involvement amounts to federal government corruption, Lummis nodded toward that view on Tuesday.

"Maybe this is about concern that certain people that have family members in the administration are going to be advantaged in some way by what we're doing," she said. "I don't want that to be the case. I want everybody to be advantaged."

She noted at the Wednesday event that there was — at one point of the stablecoin debate in the Senate — a setback with the Democratic supporters, who hit the brakes to criticize some of the bill's security provisions and also the potential conflicts of Trump's personal crypto interests.

Those Democrats, including Senator Ruben Gallego, did come around later. But it's so far unclear how much those lawmakers will press for the market structure effort to ban government officials from crypto and whether that would be a deal breaker for Republicans.

At this point, the U.S. House of Representatives has been in the lead on crypto market structure, having passed its Digital Asset Market Clarity Act from two committees on its way toward the House floor. But it now has to fix on a strategy for how it may or may not fold the stablecoin effort into that bill or pursue it separately. One option is to simply sign off on the Senate's Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, which would send that piece to Trump more immediately, as he requested in a recent social-media post.

The Senate remains the highest hurdle for U.S. legislation, so any House successes will run into the need to win wide Democratic support in the Senate.

Read More: U.S. Senators Pitch New Crypto Market Structure Framework as Hearing Approaches