We've spoken a lot about stablecoin legislation in this newsletter over the past few weeks. The other half of this coin is market structure legislation. The House of Representatives has the Clarity Act, which advanced out of committee. The Senate Banking Committee has just started working on its own market structure legislation — with an actual bill to be introduced in the coming weeks — and we still haven't heard much from the Senate Agriculture Committee.
The Senate Banking Committee expects to be done with market structure legislation by Sept. 30, Chairman Tim Scott told White House adviser Bo Hines on Thursday. That's after the August recess deadline lawmakers and White House crypto czar David Sacks announced back in February, but still well within the more realistic end-of-2025 timeline lobbyists expected. Sen. Cynthia Lummis, who chairs the Banking Committee's digital asset subcommittee, said at an event earlier this week that she also expects to have all of the legislative efforts wrapped up by the end of the year.
The Banking Committee has already published a set of guiding principles for the market structure bill, which will be introduced at a future date.
The Senate Agriculture Committee, which also needs to weigh in given its oversight of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has not yet introduced a bill. An individual familiar with the situation said it may not introduce a bill of its own until September, after the recess. A spokesperson for the committee did not return a request for comment on Friday.
The House of Representatives has an advantage over the Senate in that regard; market structure legislation awaits a full floor vote but is at least out of committee. Where the Senate retains an advantage is in stablecoin legislation, which it's already passed.
The House does have its own stablecoin bill awaiting a floor vote — the STABLE Act — though U.S. President Donald Trump said he would prefer a vote on the Senate version. That's unlikely, another person familiar with the matter told CoinDesk.
"I think there's some concern that adopting GENIUS would maybe cause some agita in the House," the person said. "There's really not a consensus that I can see at this moment."
Indeed, House Financial Services Committee Chairman French Hill said at an event earlier this week that while he's "open to listening to [his] colleagues," there were some differences between the House and Senate versions.
But let's say these bills do both become law by the end of the year. The process then goes to the regulators — the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, bank regulators and so on. The SEC and CFTC especially will be tasked with launching a rulemaking process to develop the regulations that will ultimately govern how crypto companies operate in the U.S.
Rashan Colbert, the U.S. policy director for the Crypto Council for Innovation, said it would be a "substantive" process. The GENIUS Act, for example, articulates an 18-month process once it's signed into law.
The process for both stablecoin legislation and the market structure bill will include the initial rulemaking, where the regulators develop their proposals; public feedback periods, where they publish these proposals and industry participants, legal experts and others weigh in; and eventually finalization.
"In the past few years regarding crypto, the amount of feedback from industry, from the public, has been overwhelming, and so you can only assume that more records will be broken when feedback is requested on provisions that stem from Clarity or stem from GENIUS," Colbert said.
The first individual pointed to the Dodd-Frank Act passed by Congress in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis as an example of how long rulemaking may take. The bill was signed into law in 2010 and took effect that July.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau filed a final rule implementing a section of that law in March 2023.
