What to know:
- The digital assets subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee held a hearing to consider ideas for crypto market-structure legislation — the second and more complicated of two major crypto initiatives pushed by President Donald Trump and his allies.
- Democrats sought to highlight the president's crypto business interests.
- Representative French Hill, who chairs the overall committee, suggested a bill is coming soon on market structure, and later on Wednesday, a counterpart subcommittee of the House Agriculture Committee had a related hearing on crypto market structure.
The U.S. House Financial Services Committee checked the next box in moving toward what Representative Bryan Steil referred to as the "second half" of President Donald Trump's crypto agenda: a bill to set U.S. crypto market rules for a fully regulated domestic industry.
Steil, the Republican chairman of the panel's crypto subcommittee, said that the first half of Trump's goal is well underway — Congress' stablecoin legislation that's already advanced through committees in both the House and Senate — so a Wednesday hearing explored the other long-awaited digital assets bill to establish the structure of crypto markets. Such hearings represent a rung on such an effort's climb through Congress.
Representative French Hill, the Arkansas Republican who runs the overall committee, indicated that those working on the bill are closer to releasing a successor to the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21), the House legislation that passed last year but failed to progress through the Senate.
"The committee has engaged with a wide range of stakeholders, from government agencies to leaders in the ecosystem to identify ways market structure legislation can be further refined and strengthened," he said during the hearing. "We're actively working to release a legislative discussion draft that reflects that feedback from members and market participants."
Democrats on the committee returned repeatedly to the crypto business activity of Trump and his family, questioning industry lawyers about whether it represents a conflict of interest. Representative Maxine Waters, the committee's ranking Democrat, accused the panel of trying to make Trump "the king of crypto by passing legislation that lets him corner the market on stablecoins, kick George Washington off the dollar and make his own stablecoin."
The witnesses mostly declined to engage on Trump, though a consumer advocate testifying on Wednesday, Alexandra Thornton, a senior director at the Center for American Progress, noted "there have been a number of things that the Trump administration has done that have favored crypto, and they include many that you mentioned, but also letting go of many enforcement staff, dropping many cases against crypto."