Crypto industry insiders met with key senators on market structure bill negotiation

Some crypto leaders met on Wednesday with key lawmakers as the U.S. Senate is about to take some time off from the negotiations over a crypto market structure bill — the industry's most important policy aim.

"It was a bipartisan showing of interest and forward momentum," said Kara Calvert, Coinbase's vice president for U.S. policy, who spoke with CoinDesk after attending the meeting. She described the sense in the room as: "We are going to get to a markup, and we need to find areas of compromise to get that done."

Senator Tim Scott, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee that's taken a lead on trying to advance the bill, hosted the meeting with several insiders and lobbying groups as the lawmakers continue to negotiate several details of the bill. This latest gathering included Coinbase and other crypto-connected companies, such as Kraken, Ripple, a16z and Chainlink, in addition to industry advocacy groups such as Crypto Council for Innovation's CEO Ji Kim, the Blockchain Association, the Digital Chamber and DeFi Education Fund, plus Democratic lawmakers, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., BNY and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA).

In a statement, Scott said the senators are “working through the text in a thoughtful, deliberate way."

Attendees told CoinDesk that it was a final chance in 2025 to clarify positions, such as DeFi's defense of software developers. Nothing new was resolved, they said, but it set the stage for the coming negotiation in January.

Cody Carbone, the CEO of the Digital Chamber, described the meeting in a Wednesday note: "Though there are still several significant policy issues to iron out, we are optimistic that these hurdles can be cleared because Senate leaders, who made time to meet with us today before departing Washington for the holiday, are committed to finding common ground to define the rules of the road for digital assets in the U.S.," it said.

Many of the same executives have been routine visitors of offices on Capitol Hill in recent weeks as lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have worked to find common ground on a market structure bill that can follow up on the successful effort earlier this year to pass a law governing U.S. stablecoin issuers.

While the industry fostered hopes for more concrete action on the legislation this year, such as a committee markup in the Banking Committee or the Senate Agriculture Committee that also has to approve a bill, the end-of-year goal has now slipped to January. That comes with some potential complications, such as the end-of-next-month budget deadline in which Congress must revisit the negotiating drama over the federal spending plans that already dealt the government a weeks-long shutdown this year.

The talks have so far hung up on such issues as the treatment of decentralized finance (DeFi) and the Democrats' proposal to ban senior officials from personal business ties to the industry, aimed predominantly at President Donald Trump.

Read More: U.S. Senate's Crypto Market Structure Bill Gets Messy as Calendar Weighs Down

UPDATE (December 17, 2025, 18:55 UTC): Adds comments from meeting participants.

UPDATE (December 17, 2025, 20:02 UTC): Adds comment from Senator Tim Scott.