Patrick McHenry: The Lawmaker Who Built a Foundation for U.S. Crypto Legislation

Patrick McHenry has spent much of his last two years in Congress on a long-shot quest to get a complex oversight regime for the crypto sector passed into law, and he failed. But failing in Congress isn't always permanent.

McHenry, the outgoing Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, embarked on an uphill battle in 2022 when he took on the cause of an industry that had just suffered widespread ruin and reputational devastation. He decided that digital assets regulation was a goal worth spending much of his political capital on, fighting a pitched battle across committees, parties and chambers of Congress to finally get his Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21) onto the floor of the House of Representatives in May of 2024. 

The vote not only passed the crypto market-structure bill, marking the furthest advance of industry legislation, but it also threw an impossible-to-ignore spotlight on its bipartisan support, with 279 Republicans and 136 Democrats supporting the bill, as younger Democrats were eager to throw off the guidance of their party leaders to make something happen. But it still wasn't enough to pressure the Senate to approve a matching measure, which would have been needed to clear its path toward becoming a law.

Now that McHenry's party will also control the Senate, there's good reason to believe a similar effort will build on FIT21 and pass both chambers in the coming session, and then be signed by the recent convert to crypto, President-elect Donald Trump. McHenry may not be there when it happens, but his fingerprints will be all over any comprehensive crypto legislation that ultimately crosses Trump's desk.

This profile is part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year's nominees, click here.