Stablecoin legislation is now in the House's court. The Senate, with a 68-30 vote, advanced the GENIUS Act on Tuesday, sending it to the House and closing that chapter in Congress' effort to turn stablecoin legislation into law.
The House of Representatives, for its part, passed market structure legislation out of committee(s) earlier this month (the Senate will hold its first subcommittee hearing on market structure legislation next Tuesday), but hasn't publicly touched stablecoin legislation since the Financial Services Committee advanced its own bill, the STABLE Act, in April. It's unclear what exactly the House might do now.
One theory that's been floating around for a few weeks is that the House could combine votes on market structure legislation with stablecoin legislation and send both bills as a package back to the Senate.
Multiple people familiar with this theory have told me they think it's unlikely that this will actually happen. The House is unlikely to adopt the Senate's bill as-is, and should the House send the Senate its market structure bill, it's unlikely the Senate would adopt that bill as-is.
And yet this is still a topic of conversation, so, you know, let's see what happens.
U.S. President Donald Trump, for his part, clearly wants the GENIUS Act (or whatever the final stablecoin legislation might be called) passed on its own, with "no delays, no add ons."
Rep. French Hill, who runs the Financial Services Committee, said earlier this month that while the House and Senate stablecoin bills are "substantially similar," there were still differences that needed to be sorted.
If the House passes the STABLE Act as-is, the House and Senate will need to sort out the differences before the bill can go to the President's desk.
Lawmakers have a self-imposed deadline before the August recess. |