In brief
- The Senate Agriculture Committee has postponed its markup of the FIT21 crypto bill to late January.
- Chairman John Boozman said bipartisan talks made progress but need more time to settle details.
- Crypto industry support hinges on how the bill addresses DeFi and yield-bearing stablecoins.
The Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry has postponed a planned markup of sweeping crypto market structure legislation to the last week of January, with Chairman John Boozman (R-AR) saying bipartisan talks had progressed over the past weekend, but still required more time to finalize outstanding issues before the bill could advance.
In a statement released Monday, Boozman said the committee would delay consideration of the bill to ensure it receives the broad support needed to move forward.
A delay now leaves the outcome of those talks unresolved, with industry support still contingent on how lawmakers ultimately address DeFi and stablecoins as the bill moves to a new markup later this month and a potential test of bipartisan backing in the Senate.
“I remain committed to advancing bipartisan crypto market structure legislation,” Boozman wrote. “We have made meaningful progress and had constructive discussions as we work toward this goal.”
The committee was initially scheduled to mark up the legislation on Thursday, January 15, in alignment with the Banking Committee’s planned action on market structure.
It comes as stakeholders across the crypto and financial industries met privately last week to discuss specifics of the crypto market structure bill, introduced in 2023 by a bipartisan group of House lawmakers. It passed the House in May 2024, but stalled in the Senate that year.
During discussions, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), a key Wall Street trade group, pressed to narrow disagreements over the Senate’s crypto market-structure bill, while crypto policy advocates sought to moderate SIFMA’s requests.
Sources familiar with the meeting previously told Decrypt that the treatment of decentralized finance and questions around yield-bearing stablecoins were among the issues still being debated.
In crypto, decentralized finance (DeFi) refers to blockchain-based applications that enable users to trade, lend, or manage assets directly through software, without a bank or broker holding customer funds.
The policy dispute centers on whether developers of these systems should face the same regulatory obligations as financial intermediaries when they do not control user assets.
Yield-bearing stablecoins are dollar-pegged tokens that offer returns to holders, typically by sharing interest earned on reserves.
While Trump’s GENIUS Act set baseline rules for stablecoin issuance last year, it left open how these yield-generating models and DeFi software should be treated, pushing unresolved questions into the current market structure debate.
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