In brief
- The Senate Agriculture Committee confirmed a markup for the bill for next Tuesday despite lacking bipartisan alignment.
- The proposal would regulate digital commodity intermediaries under the CFTC, despite the agency facing resource constraints.
- Senate Banking has delayed its own work, further complicating the bill’s path.
Senate Agriculture Chair John Boozman released an updated version of crypto market structure legislation on Wednesday and said it was time to move the bill to markup on Tuesday next week.
While “differences remain on fundamental policy issues,” the committee’s draft includes “input from stakeholders and represents months of work,” Boozman said in a statement.
It’s worth noting that the updated draft lacks bipartisan support, following stalled negotiations and uneven momentum as attention in the chamber shifts to legislation supporting President Donald Trump’s push for housing affordability.
Boozman previously stated last week that bipartisan talks had made progress but still needed additional time to resolve outstanding issues before the bill could move forward.
The Senate Agriculture Committee’s decision to move forward without Democratic sign-off comes as the Senate Banking Committee, which holds keys to the broader financial system, delays its own work on crypto market structure, a divergence in committee posture that adds uncertainty around how the measure advances.
“Although it’s unfortunate that we couldn’t reach an agreement, I am grateful for the collaboration that has made this legislation better,” Boozman said of their committee’s decision. “It’s time we move this bill, and I look forward to the markup next week.”
Taking time
The Senate Agriculture Committee’s latest draft “signals that the will to enact bipartisan market structure legislation this year remains strong,” Cody Carbone, CEO of industry trade association Digital Chamber, told Decrypt.
“The momentum has not shifted,” Carbone said.
Patrick Witt, executive director of the President’s Council of Advisers on Digital Assets, urged lawmakers on Tuesday to move ahead with market structure legislation, saying it’s a “question of when, not if.”
President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has openly embraced the push, acknowledging on Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos that Congress is “working very hard on crypto market structure legislation.”
Reading from a teleprompter, Trump said he hopes to sign the bill “very soon” as it would help unlock “new pathways to reach financial freedom.”
Momentarily looking away, the president added that this goes for “Bitcoin, all of them.”
What’s being discussed?
The new draft from the Senate Agriculture Committee is billed as the Digital Commodity Intermediaries Act and builds on earlier bipartisan crypto market structure discussion drafts circulated in the Senate.
While these efforts are often grouped under the banner of “market structure,” they operate at different layers of regulation and have moved through different committees.
The Senate Agriculture measure focuses on regulating digital commodity intermediaries under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, setting registration and compliance rules for trading platforms and related services.
The House-backed Clarity Act, meanwhile, seeks to resolve broader questions of asset classification and regulatory jurisdiction between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the CFTC across the crypto market.
Debates on expanding the CFTC’s role in overseeing crypto markets come at a time when the agency faces staffing and resource constraints, with its internal watchdog flagging digital asset oversight as a risk given its already limited capacity.
Observers have also questioned the practical considerations around the CFTC’s capacity.
“The CFTC wasn’t built to oversee on-chain markets using enforcement tools designed for traditional, intermediated finance,” Seth Hallem, CEO of crypto security firm Certora, told Decrypt.
Prediction markets and on-chain financial markets are “autonomous software systems with risks that develop in real-time,” Hallem said, arguing that traditional tools such as disclosures and compliance audits are made irrelevant because of that nature.
What could work is “a combination of clear market rules, cryptographic methods for guaranteeing compliance, and mathematical proof that systems do what they claim,” he added.
Daily Debrief Newsletter
Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.
